If the rise of Sam Bankman-Fried was a modern tale about cryptocurrency tokens and “effective altruism,” his fall seems to be as old as original sin. “This is really old-fashioned embezzlement,” John Ray , the caretaker CEO of the failed crypto exchange FTX, told the House on Tuesday. “This is just taking money from customers and using it for your own purpose, not sophisticated at all.”Mr. Bankman-Fried, FTX’s co-founder, was arrested Monday in the Bahamas and is expected to be extradited. SBF, as he is often called, has been on a media tour since FTX’s failure, and he portrays himself as a well-intentioned doofus savant who got in way over his head and—whoops—lost billions of dollars. The sloppiness of bookkeeping is true enough: Mr. Ray said invoices and expenses were communicated via Slack chats, and “they used QuickBooks.”

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