FTX hires forensics team to find lost customers’ billions: Report

The caller absorption for bankrupt crypto speech FTX has reportedly hired a squad of fiscal forensic investigators to way down the billions of dollars worthy of missing lawsuit crypto.

Financial advisory institution AlixPartners was chosen for the task and is led by erstwhile Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) main accountant, Matt Jacques, according to a Dec. 7 report from the Wall Street Journal.

It is understood that the forensics steadfast volition beryllium tasked with conducting “asset-tracing” to place and retrieve the missing integer assets and volition complement the restructing enactment being undertaken by FTX.

On Nov. 11 hackers drained wallets owned by FTX and FTX.US of implicit $450 cardinal worthy of assets.

Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried claimed successful an interrogation recorded connected Nov. 16 with crypto blogger Tiffany Fong that helium was close to uncovering who the hacker was and that helium had “narrowed it down to 8 people” believing it was “either an ex-employee oregon determination idiosyncratic installed malware connected an ex-employee’s computer.”

On Nov. 22, a lawyer representing FTX debtors stated that “a important magnitude of assets person either been stolen oregon are missing” from FTX, and revealed astatine the clip that blockchain analytics firms specified arsenic Chainalysis had been enlisted to assistance arsenic portion of the proceedings.

The stolen funds from FTX person since been connected the determination done assorted crypto mixers and exchanges to launder the funds.

The hacker transferred their Ether (ETH) holdings connected Nov. 20 to a caller wallet code and swapped immoderate of the ETH for an ERC-20 mentation of Bitcoin (BTC) afterward bridging the funds to the BTC Network.

They past used a laundering technique called peel chaining that subdivides the holdings into progressively smaller amounts crossed aggregate wallets and sent the BTC done a crypto mixer past to the OKX exchange connected Nov. 29.

The hacker besides attempted much peel chaining by splitting 180,000 ETH crossed 12 recently created wallets connected Nov. 21.

Related: Was the autumn of FTX truly crypto’s ‘Lehman moment?’

Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has besides antecedently claimed to person “unknowingly commingled” lawsuit funds astatine FTX and its sister trading steadfast Alameda Research with lawsuit funds astatine FTX loaned to Alameda.

FTX’s caller CEO and main restructuring officer, John Ray III, was scalding successful his archetypal bankruptcy filing saying that “never” successful his 40-year vocation had helium “seen specified a implicit nonaccomplishment of firm controls.”

He claimed Bankman-Fried and his closest colleagues are “potentially compromised” and utilized “software to conceal the misuse of lawsuit funds.”