FTX hires forensic experts to find lost cryptocurrencies

The new management of the bankrupt FTX crypto exchange has hired a group of financial forensic experts to track down the missing funds of defrauded customers. According to a December 7 report by the Wall Street Journal, AlixPartners, a financial consulting company headed by former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chief accountant Matt Jacques, was chosen for this task.

Back on November 11, hackers stole more than $ 450 million from FTX and FTX.US crypto wallets. Afterwards, former crypto exchange CEO Сем Бенкман-Фрід" href="https://noworries.media/biography/sem-benkman-frid/" data-bio-id="3697">Sam Benkman-Fried said in an interview with Tiffany Fong that he was «close to finding the hacker and that he had narrowed the circle of suspects to eight people.» Benkman-Fried also did not shy away from accusations, emphasizing that the funds could have been stolen «either by a former employee or someone somewhere installed malware on a former employee’s computer.»

Since then, the hackers have been moving the stolen cryptocurrency to exchanges for money laundering using cryptocurrency mixers. On November 20, the attackers transferred their ETH assets to a new crypto wallet address and exchanged some ETH for ERC-20 tokens.

The new FTX CEO and Chief Restructuring Officer John Ray III, in his first bankruptcy filing, said that he had never in his 40-year career «seen such a complete failure of corporate control.» He claimed that Bankman-Fried and his closest colleagues were «potentially compromised» and used «software to conceal the misuse of customer funds.»

It should be added that the FTX funds that the Securities Commission of the Bahamas (SCB), where Bankman-Fried is likely to be located, was transferred to a state-controlled wallet to ensure that the interests oflocal investors were protected. Benkman-Fried himself is not above seeking professional legal support from dubious specialists — the FTX founder hired a lawyer who had previously defended Mexican drug cartel head Joaquin Guzman, who was sentenced to life imprisonment, in court.