FTX Executives Expressed Concern Over Use of Customer Funds, Documents Show

FTX Executives Expressed Concern Over Use of Customer Funds, Documents Show

Lawyers for Mr. Wang and Mr. Singh declined to remark. A lawyer for Ms. Ellison didn’t reply to a request for remark. A spokesman for the U.S. lawyer’s workplace for the Southern District of New York, which is main the prison investigation into FTX, declined to remark.

A spokesman for Mr. Bankman-Fried declined to remark.

The authorities communications got here at a comparatively early section of the investigation into Mr. Bankman-Fried, earlier than Ms. Ellison and Mr. Wang pleaded responsible, and it’s doable that prosecutors’ understanding of some particulars of the case might have developed.

But in line with the paperwork, in 2020, one of the FTX software program builders, generally known as CC-1, ran a question in an organization database and discovered that Alameda had a unfavorable stability on the alternate of “roughly tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.” The information led CC-1 to conclude that Alameda was “inappropriately utilizing FTX.com buyer funds,” in line with the paperwork.

The government raised the problem with Mr. Bankman-Fried, who responded that “it was okay,” the paperwork say, as a result of the cash Alameda had borrowed was backed by FTT, a cryptocurrency that FTX had invented.

Around the identical time, FTX was present process an audit, in line with the paperwork, and the high-level Alameda government requested Mr. Bankman-Fried whether or not the auditors would increase any considerations about Alameda’s use of buyer funds. “Bankman-Fried responded that auditors didn’t sometimes concentrate on such points,” the paperwork present.

Concerns about Alameda intensified someday round final September. The agency had not too long ago misplaced about $5 billion, and Mr. Bankman-Fried mentioned the chance of shutting it down, in line with the paperwork.

Around that point, the paperwork say, the software program developer generally known as CC-1 informed the opposite software program developer, labeled CC-2, that Alameda had borrowed roughly $13 billion from FTX.