In light of FTX’s global collapse, a team of financial investigators is working closely with the island nation’s securities regulator to investigate whether there has been any criminal wrongdoing, police said on Sunday. The Bahamas is where FTX’s international operations are based, as well as retired boss Sam Bankman-Fried.
The securities regulator had previously stated that the company was suspected of having embezzled customer funds, among other things. Bankman-Fried’s international crypto platform FTX.com ran into payment difficulties a week ago after doubts about capital reserves led to customer flight and billions in funds being withdrawn. On Wednesday it initially looked as if the competitor Binance would take over most of the ailing group. But that plan fell through the next day.
assets frozen
On Thursday, the Bahamian securities regulator said it had frozen certain assets of FTX and requested a liquidator to handle it. According to FTX, it applied for bankruptcy protection in the USA on Friday, and Bankman-Fried announced his resignation as boss. However, the 30-year-old said he wanted the handover to the new boss, John J. Ray III. to accompany.
The legal counsel of FTX’s US subsidiary, Ryne Miller, said on Twitter on Saturday that there had been “unauthorized transactions”. British analytics firm Elliptic has suggested that $473 million in crypto assets were stolen from FTX on Friday night.
As a 30-year-old star entrepreneur, Bankman-Fried had graced the front pages of well-known US business journals just a few months ago. His company, which was valued at 32 billion dollars by investors at times, collapsed completely within a few days. The FTX debacle also weighed on the already badly battered crypto market.
At least a billion dollars gone
The news website CoinDesk, which specializes in cyber currencies, reported on a hacking attack on the crypto exchange. “FTX has been hacked,” an administrator of the company wrote in a non-public support channel on the Telegram news service. FTX has called on its customers to delete FTX apps and avoid the FTX website. Reuters was initially unable to verify the truthfulness of this information.
According to insiders, at least one billion dollars in customer funds are said to have disappeared from FTX. Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion in client funds from FTX to his own trading company Alameda Research, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Saturday. A part of this sum has disappeared. Insiders, who until recently held senior positions at FTX, estimated the missing amount to be between $1 billion and $2 billion. The financial gap emerged from documents that Bankman-Fried made available to other FTX managers last Sunday.
Bankman-Fried disagreed that it was not a clandestine transaction. However, there were misunderstandings in the booking, he explained in a text message to Reuters. He was in the Bahamas, said on request, rejecting speculation that he had flown to Argentina. On Friday, Bankman-Fried said on Twitter that he was surprised by what was happening at the crypto exchange he founded and had to first get an overview of the events himself.
Source: Nachrichten
