According to a Bloomberg report published Dec. 27, the U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the whereabouts of approximately $372 million in missing digital assets from now-defunct cryptocurrency exchanges FTX and FTX US. On November 12, amid bankruptcy and internal collapse, FTX warned clients of unusual wallet activity regarding at least 228,523 Ether (ETH) being transferred from the exchange by an unknown perpetrator.
On Nov. 11, or the night the company filed for bankruptcy, FTX US General Counsel Ryne Miller confirmed that the transactions were unauthorized and that the subsidiary exchange had moved all cryptos to cold wallets as a precautionary measure. On Nov. 20, blockchain forensics firm Elliptic wrote that the unauthorized transfers totaled $477 million and the unknown perpetrator exchanged the stolen Ether for RenBTC before bridging to Bitcoin via the RenBridge service. Ren was acquired by FTX-affiliated hedge fund Alameda Research last year and has been accused by Elliptic of “laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto.”
Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried claimed the incident was either committed by a former FTX employee or by someone who had unauthorized access to a former employee’s computer. “I narrowed it down to eight people. I don’t know which one it was,” he said in an interview with citizen journalist Tiffany Fong.
In the last known update to the Nov. 29 edition, crypto analyst zachXBT claimed that some of the stolen funds were transferred to Singapore-based exchange OKX using a bitcoin mixer. Lennix Lai, Director of OKX, responded, “#OKX is aware of the situation and the team is investigating wallet flow.”
#OKX is aware of the situation and the team is investigating the wallet flow.
— lennixlai.eth (OKX) (@LennixOKX) November 29, 2022