From his mansion in the Bahamas, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has pretty much spoken with anyone who’d give him a platform in order to explain why his crypto empire failed.
U.S. federal prosecutors would very much like to know what happened too, which is why there are now multiple investigations into FTX and its founder over allegations of fraud, manipulation, and more.
According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Department of Justice is currently looking into millions of dollars that were allegedly transferred out of FTX and to the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried resides. The money appears to have been moved while FTX froze withdrawals for its own customers.
In addition to this latest investigation, according to the New York Times, U.S. prosecutors are also looking into whether Bankman-Fried (who also goes by SBF) manipulated the market earlier this year and helped play a role in the collapse of the stablecoin Terra and its sister token Luna. The collapse of those two cryptocurrencies sent the entire crypto market into a downward spiral this past summer. The founder of Terra and Luna, Do Kwon, is currently on the lam, hiding from an international arrest warrant from South Korean authorities.
These two newly publicized investigations would be in addition to the previously known inquiries regarding whether SBF acted improperly when sending FTX customer funds over to Alameda Research in order to make risky investments.
It has now been a month since FTX filed for bankruptcy. What was once one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world crumbled in a matter of days following reports that its affiliated hedge fund, Alameda Research, was using FTX customer funds to make trades and was actually insolvent.
Billions in clients’ money is lost and billions more has gone unaccounted for. So, people have asked, why is Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder — and, up until the collapse, CEO — of FTX, still a free man? Likely complicating the investigations is just how SBF and FTX’s employees ran the business.
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” said FTX’s new CEO, John Ray III, who was appointed following the bankruptcy. It should be noted that Ray is the same individual who was brought in after Enron’s collapse in 2001.
