Sam Bankman-Fried is reportedly in the Bahamas as up to $2 billion in customer funds disappear through ‘back door’ BYYueqi Yang and Bloomberg November 13, 2022 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...the-bahamas-reuters-reports?srnd=premium-asia Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and chief executive officer of FTX. Jeenah Moon—Bloomberg via Getty Images Sam Bankman-Fried, the fallen co-founder of bankrupt FTX, said Saturday he’s in the Bahamas, Reuters reported, citing a text message from him. Bankman-Fried denied rumors that he had flown to South America. His crypto exchanges FTX, FTX US and trading firm Alameda filed for bankruptcy on Friday. Since then, FTX was hit by a mysterious outflow of at least $662 million in tokens. The general counsel of its US arm, Ryne Miller, described it as “unauthorized transactions” on Twitter and said FTX had begun moving digital assets into cold storage — wallets that are unconnected to the internet — to mitigate damage. Bankman-Fried didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters, citing anonymous sources, reported today that Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to his trading company Alameda Research, and that a big chunk of that has since vanished. One source it spoke to put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion, while another estimated it was between $1 billion and $2 billion. FTX filed for bankruptcy yesterday after a barrage of customer withdrawals earlier this week, and Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. While CoinDesk and the Wall Street Journal had reported on customer funds from FTX ending up at Alameda, the Reuters reporting on the missing funds came today. FTX is based in Bahamas, where what one source called a “gang of kids” including Bankman-Fried ran the platform from a luxury penthouse, according to CoinDesk, with FTX and Alameda’s offices located steps apart.
BlockFi and Voyager got bailed out by FTX but it seems from the frying pan... All their crypto assets are gone FTX is evil, these assets belong to people that have no intention of trading or using FTX com Imagine if the founder of ET had cryptos on BlockFi now completely gone, good thing he doesn't but the BlockFi credit card does not work any more from what I read
I kept getting pressured into that stupid BlockFi card, and a bunch of others which I specifically refused to do! The only card I applied for, was the IBKR one, and THAT I have never used (yet). But I am pretty sure Inter-Active Brokers will still be around tomorrow. I watched them barely do a dip when they got put on the hook for that margin-call of hell with negative WTI futures in that shit-show fiasco. I believe they lost a Billion $ they had to cough up to meet requirements by the clearing firms. Or was that $10 billion? I forget now... Unfortunately, it did bruise Tom P. a bit, as you'd think his PROFESSIONAL platform should have realized that negative oil prices were at least a REMOTE possibility days prior, despite it had never happened in history.
Cold storage means it has no utility. I can use a card attached to my equity vol account and buy coffee. Nobody has ever lost a dime in an SEC-regulated brokerage account due to insolvency. None of you can go a week without getting scammed. I use Coinbase/wallet. I own plenty of crypto; bot 2K wrapped BNB in the last 24h. You can't go a week w/o a hack or a liquidity crisis. You're a fucking idiot.
Why do people who have no idea how traditional finance works feel the need to write this insane nonsense? My shares are in a customer segregated account which is also covered by outside insurance. In traditonal finance, there is typically an umbrella organization that protects customers, even if an individual firm fails. With a conventional US broker, I'm protected by SIPC insurance. With a US bank it's FDIC. With a credit union it NCUA With a 401k account it's protected under PBGC Regular people insist on this because they are not morons. The crypto space is full of people shouting "No time to do any diligence, just take my money!". FOMO has destroyed capacity for rational thought. And there's always some genius saying, "They should just keep everything in cold storage and transact directly with everyone!" without thinking through the huge mess of problems that creates. So you're going to make nothing but instantaneous irrevocable Bitcoin transfers.... and that's going to stop you from getting ripped off?!
This FTX scam is pretty elaborate especially with the familial connections and all. This guy SBF is pretty smart to have gone this long and keep up the ponzi. No guarantee Binance will survive. This does remind me a little of the shenanigans during the pre-SEC US stock market action. Although the NYSE was always legitimate, some of the people who traded on it were out and out scammers. And then you had the cadre of "brokers" that were in fact just bucket shops. No regulations is a recipe for scamming. No way around this due to the human nature of greed. The boy plunger (Jesse Livermore), probably the greatest trader ever, never really adapted to the rules of the SEC post 1932. He was never as good as a trader again so the rules were that radically changed.
Why Binance? They were FTX share holders and pulled out. They even tipped them off a cliff at the end. And who knows what politics was SBF pushing that didn't help Binance in the USA... There are some interesting tweets that precede this drama. I like to think Binance is ok.