Sam Bankan-Fried, aka Scam Bankrun-Fraud, may have seen some 95% of his paper “net worth” vanish overnight as his check-kiting ponzi scheme finally blew up – with CZ set to hammer the final blow as he walks away from the non-binding deal – but the CEO of FTX may have less to worry if he will make the Forbes 30 under 30 and be more concerned about doing 30 at some Federal Penitentiary.
According to Bloomberg, US regulators are investigating whether FTX.com “properly handled customer funds”, as well as its relationship with other parts of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, such as the in-house hedge fund Alameda Research, which contrary to its name, did zero research. Worse, as head of R&D at CoinMetrics noted overnight, the circular fund flows between FTX and Alameda were clear to anyone who bothered to look.
1/ I found evidence that FTX might have provided a massive bailout for Alameda in Q2 which now came back to haunt them.
40 days ago, 173 million FTT tokens worth over 4B USD became active on-chain.
A rabbit hole appeared 🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/DtCyPspME0
— Lucas Nuzzi (@LucasNuzzi) November 8, 2022
The investigations by the SEC and the CFTC probes relate to the liquidity crisis at the trading platform that led to the sudden and unexpected collapse of the firm and the planned buyout of its non-US operations by Binance. Regulators are also reportedly looking into the platform’s relationship with FTX.com’s American counterpart FTX US and Bankman-Fried’s trading house Alameda Research.
The good news here is that regulators won’t have to dig too deep: as we noted last night, Alameda’s own CEO (who is about 19-years-old) was kind enough to make a full admission of the fraud that was taking place at the firm just hours before the spectacular implosion.
curiously this tweet, let’s name it “Exhibit A” for obvious reasons, has not been deleted yet https://t.co/gfmnaGRBkv
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 9, 2022
The confusing news it that according to Bloomberg, the SEC’s inquiry began months ago as a probe into FTX US and its crypto-lending activities; how the SEC was unable to spot the glaring fraud here is troubling. Alternatively, it is possible that as the SEC dug deep and found out all sorts of rot, that it caused Alameda to panic and begin the slide into oblivion.
As for SBF and other FTX employees who just two days ago were busy showing off their brand new Miami office…
Do the windows open? https://t.co/0A7vDhOQxc
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 9, 2022
… they may find their new digs a tad less enjoyable as they transition from FTX to ADX.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/09/2022 – 11:52
