A forensic accountant at
Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial tried piecing together where $9 billion of missing FTX customer funds went on Wednesday. “Oh, yes,” said the accountant when asked if FTX ever misused customer funds.
Peter Easton, an accounting professor at the University of Notre Dame brought in by the prosecution, says user deposits were reinvested into businesses and real estate, used to make political contributions, and donated to charity, reports
CoinDesk Thursday.
Importantly, Easton points to certain transactions that SBF was involved in that would have required customer funds to complete. In a key interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos back in November 2022, the FTX founder denied that he knew “that there was any
improper use of customer funds.”
Customer funds peaked at FTX in June of 2022 when $11.3 billion was supposed to be held at Alameda Research, but its bank accounts only held $2.3 billion. Easton found customer funds lost their backing as early as March 2021.
Easton says customer funds were invested in
Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital and Lily Zhang’s Modulo Capital. Modulo Capital returned
$404 million to FTX in March of 2023 saying the funds had been wrongly transferred. FTX customers also unknowingly funded a $550 million investment into Genesis Digital Assets, a crypto mining firm, not to be confused with
the other Genesis making crypto news the same day.