FTX employs forensics team to recover billions from lost customers

According to reports, the new administration of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has recruited a group of financial forensic detectives to find the lost client cryptocurrency valued at vast sums.

As shown in a Dec. 7 Wall Street Journal article, financial advice firm AlixPartners was selected for the job and is run by Matt Jacques, an ex - chief accountant for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

According to what is known, the forensics company will be involved with carrying out “asset-tracing” to locate and reclaim the lost virtual currencies, which will support the restructuring progress being made by FTX.

Timeline of the FTX Downfall

Hackers stole about $450 million worth of assets from accounts controlled by FTX and FTX.US on November 11.

In a Nov. 16 press conference with cryptocurrency writer Tiffany Fong, former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried asserted that he was near to identifying the culprit.

A lawyer for FTX debtors claimed on November 22 that “a large quantity of assets were either stolen or are missing” from FTX. At the moment, it was made known that blockchain analysis companies like Chainalysis had been hired to assist with the case.

Since then, the FTX money has indeed been seized and has been moving through numerous cryptocurrency exchanges and mixers to be laundered.

On November 20, the perpetrator moved their Ether (ETH) holdings to a new digital wallet, and a portion of the ETH was exchanged for an ERC-20 form of Bitcoin (BTC), which was then used to connect the assets to the BTC Network.

On Nov. 29, they transmitted the BTC through some kind of crypto mixer and the OKX exchange using a laundering methodology named peel chaining, which splits the holdings into successively smaller quantities throughout many wallets.

On November 21, the attacker made another effort at peel chaining by distributing 180,000 ETH among 12 freshly made wallets.

According to WikiBits site visit, the building might be a branch campus of UC Berkeley University, as per the large sign at the doorway. It was impossible to locate the cryptocurrency exchange's registered trademark. Instead of the Exchange's headquarters, it is the workplace of UC BERKELEY University on the fourth level.

As a reminder, WikiBit is ready to help you search the qualifications and reputation of projects in a bid to protect you from hidden dangers in this risky industry!

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