American authorities are investigating whether Sam Bankman-Fried, the creator and former CEO of FTX, may have manipulated the prices of the cryptocurrencies TerraUSD and Luna earlier this year to benefit his firms, as reported by The New York Times.
Two persons with knowledge of the situation said the authorities are investigating whether SBF “steered” the values of those stablecoins or not.
The NYT also noted that the inquiry into Bankman-Fried’s TerraUSD and Luna’s trading activities is still in its early stages. It is not apparent whether prosecutors have determined any wrongdoing by SBF or when investigators began looking into his company’s trades.
However, the report highlights that Bankman-Fried said he was unaware of any market manipulation and had never participate in it.
FTX Hires Forensics Team
FTX’s new administration hired a group of financial forensic investigators to find the lost customer crypto worth billions of dollars.
Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 7 the financial advice firm AlixPartners, a former chief accountant for the SEC, is selected for the task.
As part of FTX’s restructuring efforts, the forensics firm will perform “asset tracing” to find and retrieve the missing digital assets.
On Nov. 11, hackers stole about $450 million worth of assets from wallets owned by FTX and FTX.US. Since then, the stolen assets from FTX have been moving through multiple crypto exchanges and mixers to launder them. On Nov. 21, the hacker divided 180,000 ETH among 12 freshly made wallets in an additional peel-chaining effort.
Related Reading | Hedge Fund Sue Crypto Firm Grayscale For Mismanagement
On Nov. 29, they transmitted BTC via a crypto mixer and the OKX exchange using a laundering technique, peel chaining. This technique distributes the holdings into progressively smaller quantities across many wallets.
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