US Department of Justice probing $372M FTX exploit: Report

According to a December 27 Bloomberg report, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating about $372 million in missing digital assets from defunct crypto exchanges FTX and FTX US. It was started. On November 12th, amid bankruptcy and implosion, FTX alerted its customers to unusual wallet activity involving at least 228,523 Ether (ETH) transferred from the exchange by unknown perpetrators.

Nov. 11 – The day the company filed for bankruptcy – FTX US General Counsel Ryne Miller has confirmed that the transaction was fraudulent and that subsidiary exchanges have moved all cryptocurrencies to cold wallets as a precautionary measure. On November 20th, blockchain forensics firm Elliptic reported that the fraudulent transfer amounted to $477 million, and that an unknown perpetrator was sending stolen Ether to Bitcoin (BTC) through the RenBridge service after he exchanged it for RenBTC. BTC). Ren claims he was acquired by FTX-linked hedge fund Alameda Research in 2021, and that Elliptic “laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency.”

Infamous FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried claimed the incident was perpetrated by a former FTX employee or someone who had unauthorized access to a former employee’s computer. I don’t know which one it was,” he said in an interview with citizen journalist Tiffany Fong.

In the latest known update to this issue on Nov. 29, crypto analyst ZachXBT claims that some of the stolen funds were transferred to Singapore-based exchange OKX using a Bitcoin mixer. Did. “#OKX is aware of the situation and the team is investigating the wallet flow,” said Lennix Lai, managing director of OKX.

#OKX is aware of the situation and the team is investigating the wallet flow.

— lennixlai.eth (OKX) (@LennixOKX) November 29, 2022