FTX hires forensics team to find customers’ missing billions: Report
The new management for bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has reportedly hired a team of financial forensic investigators to track down the billions of dollars worth of missing customer crypto.
Financial advisory company AlixPartners was chosen for the task and is led by former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chief accountant, Matt Jacques, according to a Dec. 7 report from the Wall Street Journal.
It is understood that the forensics firm will be tasked with conducting “asset-tracing” to identify and recover the missing digital assets and will complement the restructing work being undertaken by FTX.
On Nov. 11 hackers drained wallets owned by FTX and FTX.US of over $450 million worth of assets.
Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried claimed in an interview recorded on Nov. 16 with crypto blogger Tiffany Fong that he was close to finding who the hacker was and that he had “narrowed it down to eight people” believing it was “either an ex-employee or somewhere someone installed malware on an ex-employee’s computer.”
On Nov. 22, a lawyer representing FTX debtors stated that “a substantial amount of assets have either been stolen or are missing” from FTX, and revealed at the time that blockchain analytics firms such as Chainalysis had been enlisted to help as part of the proceedings.
The stolen funds from FTX have since been on the move through various crypto mixers and exchanges to launder the funds.
The hacker transferred their Ether (ETH) holdings on Nov. 20 to a new wallet address and swapped some of the ETH for an ERC-20 version of Bitcoin (BTC) afterward bridging the funds to the BTC Network.
They then used a laundering technique called peel chaining that subdivides the holdings into increasingly smaller amounts across multiple
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