When more than $400 million worth of crypto was mysteriously pulled out of the coffers of what was once the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, on the very day that it declared bankruptcy in November of 2022, many initially suspected insiders at the company including, potentially, then CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, now convicted of fraud.

But clues left across blockchains over the past year suggested that external thieves had chosen a particularly inconvenient moment during FTX's meltdown to pull off an enormous heist.

Government Intervention

New clues in a US Department of Justice indictment suggest something even more surprising: Some suspected thieves appear to have been in the United States and have now been arrested.

An indictment filed last week details charges against Robert Powell, Carter Rohn, and Emily Hernandez. These are accused of running a massive cybercriminal theft ring.

The group, which authorities say was known as the "Powell SIM Swapping Crew," allegedly used SIM swaps—tricking phone companies into switching a user's mobile phone registration to the thieves' SIM card so that they could gain access to authentication codes sent to the victim's phone—to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from victims' accounts.

Most notably, the gang is accused of siphoning $400 million in virtual currency from a company's accounts—named in the indictment only as Victim Company-1—on November 11, 2022, continuing into November 12.

According to Bloomberg, as first spotted by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, that is the exact timing of FTX's theft, which the company has pegged at between $415 million and $432 million in stolen crypto.

FTX and the Crypto market

If the money is FTX's, those blockchain footprints suggest that the $400 million that the hackers allegedly stole is long gone, moved into the hands of international money launderers.

"It is therefore not clear whether any of the stolen assets are under their control, and might be recovered," Elliptic wrote in its blog post today. Nonetheless, if the alleged hackers were paid a portion of that sum in exchange for their work to steal it, that money might still be seized and repaid as restitution to FTX's many creditors.

According to Wired, either way, it suggests another mystery in the story of FTX's implosion, and the billions of dollars in missing funds that disappeared with it may be partially solved. If so, it would seem that this FTX-related crime can't be blamed on Sam Bankman-Fried.

Photo: Mariia Shalabaieva/Unsplash