Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former chief executive of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange, has reportedly withdrawn a huge sum of digital coins from an offshore account.
According to on-chain data from decentralised finance (DeFi) watchdog BowTieIguana, the FTX founder has taken out $684,000 of his cryptocurrency funds from a crypto exchange in Seychelles despite remaining under house arrest.
The crypto analyst tweeted on Thursday that several wallet transactions had taken place, which Bankman-Fried allegedly withdrew at the time. This could indicate that he had violated his bail conditions to avoid spending over $1,000 without court approval.
The analysis also found that SBF transferred all remaining Ether (ETH) from his public address (0xD5758) to a new account (0x7386d), BowTiedIguana revealed.
Sushiswap had formerly owned the new account in August 2020, which received up to $367,000 from 32 Alameda Research crypto wallets.
It also received a further $322,000 from additional wallets and later transferred it to the Seychelles-based wallet exchange and a second to crypto bridge RenBridge.
BowTiedIguana also found a further five transactions at 51 ETH each, totalling ($61,000), moved to new wallets and later to the “Seychelles-based exchange.”
SBF’s wallet at address 0x64e9B later sent over three transactions of Tether (USDT) at 200,000 each to cryptocurrency exchange FixedFloat.
BowTiedIguana said in a tweet: “As the Ethereum blockchain is an immutable public ledger, this on-chain evidence is permanently available to law enforcement and the courts,”
The watchdog later urged authorities from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and others to look into the matter.
The Usual Suspects?
According to Conor Grogan, Coinbase’s strategy chief, the transactions were linked to previous Sushiswap activities.
He said in a tweet: “These wallets — assuming they all belong to him — were heavily involved with LPing Sushi early on, well before Chef Nomi handed off the project to SBF.”
Despite this, SBF had previously stated in September 2020 he had nothing to do with building the Sushiswap platform, contradicting Grogan’s statement.
Additionally, Bahamian authorities announced on 12 November that they had taken possession of $3.5 billion USD in FTX cryptocurrency to avoid an “imminent dissipation” of funds linked to alleged cybersecurity attacks on the FTX exchange.
