FTX Thief Cashes Out Millions During Bankman-Fried Trial (bbc.com) 30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A thief who stole more than $470 million in cryptocurrency when FTX crashed is trying to cash it out while the exchange's founder is on trial. Sam Bankman-Fried's high-profile court case began last week. The former crypto mogul denies fraud. After lying dormant for nine months, experts say $20 million of the stolen stash is being laundered into traditional money every day. New analysis shows how the mystery thief is trying to hide their tracks. [...] On the day FTX collapsed, hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency controlled by the exchange were stolen by an unidentified thief that is believed to still have control of the funds. No one knows how the thief -- or thieves -- was able to get digital keys to FTX crypto wallets, but it is thought it was either an insider or a hacker who was able to steal the information. The criminal moved 9,500 Ethereum coins, then worth $15.5 million, from a wallet belonging to FTX, to a new wallet. Over the next few hours, hundreds of other cryptoassets were taken from the company's wallets, in transactions eventually totaling $477 million.
According to researchers from Elliptic, a cryptocurrency investigation firm, the thief lost more than $100 million in the weeks following the hack as some was frozen or lost in processing fees as they frantically moved the funds around to evade capture. But by December around $70 million was successfully sent to a cryptocurrency mixer -- a criminal service used to launder Bitcoin, making it difficult to trace. [...] Although mixers make it difficult to trace Bitcoin, Elliptic was able to follow a small amount of the funds -- $4 million -- that was sent to an exchange. The rest of the stolen FTX stash -- around $230 million -- remained untouched until 30 September -- the weekend before Mr Bankman-Fried's trial began. Nearly every day since then chunks worth millions have been sent to a mixer for laundering and then presumably cashing out. Elliptic has been able to trace $54 million of Bitcoin being sent to the Sinbad mixer after which the trail has gone cold for now. "Crypto launderers have been known to wait for years to move and cash out assets once public attention has dissipated, but in this case they have begun to move just as the world's attention is once again directed towards FTX and the events of November 2022," said Tom Robinson, Elliptic's co-founder.
According to researchers from Elliptic, a cryptocurrency investigation firm, the thief lost more than $100 million in the weeks following the hack as some was frozen or lost in processing fees as they frantically moved the funds around to evade capture. But by December around $70 million was successfully sent to a cryptocurrency mixer -- a criminal service used to launder Bitcoin, making it difficult to trace. [...] Although mixers make it difficult to trace Bitcoin, Elliptic was able to follow a small amount of the funds -- $4 million -- that was sent to an exchange. The rest of the stolen FTX stash -- around $230 million -- remained untouched until 30 September -- the weekend before Mr Bankman-Fried's trial began. Nearly every day since then chunks worth millions have been sent to a mixer for laundering and then presumably cashing out. Elliptic has been able to trace $54 million of Bitcoin being sent to the Sinbad mixer after which the trail has gone cold for now. "Crypto launderers have been known to wait for years to move and cash out assets once public attention has dissipated, but in this case they have begun to move just as the world's attention is once again directed towards FTX and the events of November 2022," said Tom Robinson, Elliptic's co-founder.
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If the theft happened on the exact same day it crashed then it's 99.99999% likely that it was an insider.
Maybe even SBF himself or a close associate.
Is SBF being held in custody? To me it always seemed as if he gave himself up to the authorities and started turning over assets a little bit too easily. Almost as if there was another plan under way.
Re: Brilliant (Score:1)
Razzlekahn is back (Score:2)
Crypto's for fools and scammers but... (Score:3)
The guy running the Sinbad mixer is enabling crime wilfully. Somewhere, the mixer's on hardware, that can be traced. And that hardware will be incurring expenses that can be traced.
Find the owner and push his criminally criminal-abetting ass out a high window. When you refuse the law, you refuse its protection.
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> The guy running the Sinbad mixer is enabling crime wilfully.
Imagine thinking the only use for privacy is crime.
That's quite a Police State you want there.
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This guy knows he is facilitating money laundering for criminals and is concealing his identity to reduce the odds of prosecution.
He admitted this in an interview.
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push his criminally criminal-abetting ass out a high window. When you refuse the law, you refuse its protection.
I agree with the notion of prosecuting the guy, but saying that lawbreakers can be spuriously murdered goes too far. Breaking the law does NOT make someone ineligible for due process and other legal safeguards; without such processes and safeguards, any "legal" system would be a sham.
Re:Crypto's for fools and scammers but... (Score:4, Insightful)
When you refuse the law, you refuse its protection.
I see. And when there are so many laws, literally libraries full of them, that it is impossible for one person to know them all, and a system thousands of years in the making, in which the application and interpretation of law is challenged before guilt and punishment are ruled, do you still think "refuse the law, refuse its protection" is not a drag strip road to Hell?
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So this means having all Ford execs arrested because a F-150 was used in a heist?
There are many reasons people want some privacy for their cryptocurrency. Do you want a condom purchase 20 years ago to haunt you for the rest of your life? Did you do something dumb as a kid and bought something with BTC, and 30 years later, now can't find jobs due to that?
Of course, the best way to clean up cryptocurrency is to shovel it over to Monero, maybe run it through a wallet or two, then send it back to BTC. This p
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Who needs a reason to arrest Ford executives?
Poor SBF, please stop stealing from him! (Score:2)
am i the only one tho thinks it's... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:am i the only one tho thinks it's... (Score:4, Insightful)
SBF himself (or someone working in his interest)? Methinks it's more probable that he gave they keys rather than someone hacked it.
No... but that's just because he's the biggest name associated with FTX.
But I think the evidence is very strong that it's an FTX insider, probably one of the ones caught up with this trial.
1) The theft happened the day of the collapse. There's no reason to think an outsider would have found a vulnerability on that particular day. The only people with both the ability to steal the funds, but no strong motive to do so until the day of collapse, are insiders.
2) The trial doesn't affect the funds directly, but it does affect the people on trial. There's a practical reason to move the funds since they might not have unsupervised access to a computer for a very long time, there's also a psychological factor where they've scored a win with the stolen money while they're losing at trial. They may even be thinking of paying some movie style commandos to spirit them away to Russia or something (no extradition). This makes me think it's someone directly involved in the trial and not some random sysadmin.
Of course, SBF seems like the obvious answer since he's the big name, but there's a bunch of them caught up in the trial, any one of which could have stolen the funds.
Slashvertisement for Sinbad.io? (Score:1, Troll)
If not, we /already know/ it was a political money laundering operation. Follow the money.
Sam even boinked Maxine Waters, allegedly, to get favorable treatment for FTX. Watch the videos, it's /super/ creepy. The ultimate team player!
So do something about it! (Score:2)
Crypto wallets are not fucking magic, they're just data and code. Restrict access to them until the trail is over! And if he's already copied the wallet then he's not extracting funds out of FTX, they're already for all intents and purposes extracted.
Re: So do something about it! (Score:1)
hmm (Score:1)
Well this is literally the first time i have been excited about crypto currencies, so thats something!
I think i am rooting for this guy. 1, he showed how much of a scam crypto and that ceo (brinkman) was, and 2, it seems like he might get away with it. Using the only redeeming feature of crypto i have ever seen - its supposed untraceability. So i guess this will test that out as well.
I hope he takes the money and runs! spread some if it around and people wont even be mad. most people if you paid them 10 gra
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Bitcoin and similar cryptos have never included "untraceability" as a feature. Quite the opposite -- with a public ledger it's very straightforward to trace transactions. Mixers obfuscate things well in theory, but only marginally in practice, especially when records can be subpoenaed. You might be able to squirrel it away into one or more "anonymous" wallets, but as soon as its used for anything, it potentially becomes traceable again. And if you have a half-billion dollars but can never spend it, then
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"Using the only redeeming feature of crypto i have ever seen - its supposed untraceability."
The feds trace and confiscate crypto all the time! They've gotten quite good at it. You have to think 20 steps ahead to effectively hide crypto transactions from the feds.
No controls. (Score:2)
This is just indicative of the lack of financial controls at FTX. It's easy to image some admin with access to wallet keys making a copy of the DB (no doubt unencrypted) to a thumbdrive and GTFOing as Blankman-Fein was arrested and FTX filed for bankruptcy.
Just treat every transaction as suspect... (Score:2)
Could it be Sam? (Score:1)