On  19 January 2015, Mr Peterson was found guilty of eight counts  of  fraud, forgery, false accounting, and fraudulent  trading  in  one  of  the  first  hedge fund prosecutions to arise out of the 2008 financial crisis. The  conviction followed an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (“SFO”) and a three month trial regarding what the SFO described as  Mr  Peterson’s  use  of “swap trades to inflate  artificially  the  …  Fund’s  investment  performance, and thereby mislead[ing] investors as to its true value”.  Over  a  six  year period, the SFO estimated that investors were misled into putting US $780 million into the Fund. On 23 January 2015, Mr Peterson was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Sentencing Mr Peterson in Southwark Crown Court, Mr Justice Smith commented that Mr Peterson “… knew the risks that cheating entailed for investors… It was entirely foreseeable that investors would lose huge amounts. Sophisticated dishonesty on this scale calls for the maximum sentence   possible.”