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According to the new report from The Australian Financial Review, an inner circle of people using a Signal chat group “Wirefraud.”
FTX’s Signal Chat Group: “Wirefraud”
The members of the inner circle of power at collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX formed a chat group. They were using it to send secret information about operations in the lead up to the company’s spectacular failure.
As per the report, FTX founders Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Gary Wang, former FTX Director of Engineering, Nishad Singh and former Alameda CEO, Caroline Ellison, were using this chat group to send encrypted information related to their operations.
Over the following report, SBF responded with a tweet and disagreed with this fact. He wrote, “If this is true then I wasn’t a member of that inner circle. (I’m quite sure it’s just false; I have never heard of such a group.)”
However, this was the last tweet of SBF, as he got arrested by the authorities in The Bahamas later that day. The arrest was followed by the request of the U.S. government and accomplished by the Bahamian Law Enforcement.
According to a recent unsealed indictment issued by the Southern District of New York, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is charging SBF with six counts of fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and one additional count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and campaign finance laws.
Here the fraud charges include conspiracy to commit wirefraud on customers, wirefraud on lenders, commodities fraud, and securities fraud.
In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also announced it’s charging the FTX co-founder with defrauding the exchange’s investors.
As per the CNBC report, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the FTX collapse and the arrest of SBF on Monday night in the Bahamas. The new CEO of the collapsed crypto exchange, John J. Ray, and the panel’s sole witness, told lawmakers the company had “no record-keeping whatsoever.” They were using bookkeeping software QuickBooks to track its multibillion dollar portfolio.
On Tuesday, SBF appeared in court with his newly hired lawyer, Mark Cohen, and his legal team. They were asking Bahamian judge Joanne Ferguson-Pratt to release SBF on bail. But, at the end of the hearing, Judge Ferguson-Pratt denied the SBF’s request to be released on bail and sent him to a Bahamian prison until February 8, 2023.
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.
