FTX hacker moves $120M amid Sam Bankman-Fried trial: Report
Anonymous hackers of the now-defunct exchange FTX have been moving large amounts of assets stolen from the platform, with new transactions occurring just as the trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried gets underway.
As much as 72,500 Ether (ETH) of stolen assets from FTX has awakened for the first time since the exchange was hacked in November 2022, the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic reported on Oct. 12.
According to Elliptic, the thief has converted $120 million worth of ETH into Bitcoin (BTC) through the multichain decentralized exchange (DEX) THORSwap since Sept. 30, 2023.
The first converting transactions were made just a few days before Bankman-Fried’s trial started on Oct. 3. At the time of the hack, the converted amount was worth $87 million, or 18% of the total stolen funds of $477 million.
The FTX hacker applied a similar laundering technique to the one deployed in November 2022, when the hacker transferred 65,000 ETH ($100 million) to BTC using the cross-chain bridge RenBridge.
“The 180,000 ETH that was not converted to Bitcoin through RenBridge remained dormant until the early hours of Sep. 30, 2023 — by which time it was worth $300 million,” Elliptic wrote in the new report.
Elliptic mentioned that the FTX hacker lost $94 million in the days following the hack as the attacker rushed to launder the funds through decentralized exchanges, cross-chain bridges and mixers.
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Almost a year after the hack, the identity of the FTX thief is still unknown, Elliptic noted. The blockchain analytics firm suggested three possibilities for who could be behind the FTX theft: an FTX inside job, North Korea’s Lazarus Group and Russia-linked criminal groups.
“Some FTX employees would have had access to the business’s crypto assets in order to move them for operational reasons. In the chaos surrounding the company’s bankruptcy and collapse, it may have been possible for an internal actor to take these assets,” the Elliptic’s report reads.
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Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
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Elon Musk. Pic: Reuters
Mr Musk had called Ms Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” in one of a series of inflammatory posts on X in January and said she should go to jail.
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
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Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.
With a sentencing hearing scheduled in a matter of weeks, Roman Storm is potentially looking at five years in jail for running an unlicensed money transmitting service.
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