Reuters Reports $1B of Client Funds Missing at FTX

Friday the Wall Street Journal reported:Crypto exchange FTX lent billions of dollars worth of customer assets to fund risky bets by its affiliated trading firm, Alameda Research, setting the stage for the exchange's implosion, a person familiar with the matter said. FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried said in investor meetings this week that Alameda owes FTX about $10 billion, people familiar with the matter said. FTX extended loans to Alameda using money that customers had deposited on the exchange for trading purposes, a decision that Mr. Bankman-Fried described as a poor judgment call, one of the people said. All in all, FTX had $16 billion in customer assets, the people said, so FTX lent more than half of its customer funds to its sister company Alameda. And then Friday night Reuters reported that "At least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, according to two people familiar with the matter. "The exchange's founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried's trading company Alameda Research, the people told Reuters. A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said." One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion. While it is known that FTX moved customer funds to Alameda, the missing funds are reported here for the first time. The financial hole was revealed in records that Bankman-Fried shared with other senior executives last Sunday, according to the two sources. The records provided an up-to-date account of the situation at the time, they said. Both sources held senior FTX positions until this week and said they were briefed on the company's finances by top staff.... In text messages to Reuters, Bankman-Fried said he "disagreed with the characterization" of the $10 billion transfer. "We didn't secretly transfer," he said. "We had confusing internal labeling and misread it," he added, without elaborating. Asked about the missing funds, Bankman-Fried responded: "???" FTX and Alameda did not respond to requests for comment.... At the heart of FTX's problems were losses at Alameda that most FTX executives did not know about, Reuters has previously reported.... FTX legal and finance teams also learned that Bankman-Fried implemented what the two people described as a "backdoor" in FTX's book-keeping system, which was built using bespoke software. They said the "backdoor" allowed Bankman-Fried to execute commands that could alter the company's financial records without alerting other people, including external auditors... In his text message to Reuters, Bankman-Fried denied implementing a "backdoor".... On Friday, FTX said it had turned over control of the company to John J. Ray III, the restructuring specialist who handled the liquidation of Enron Corp - one of the largest bankruptcies in history.

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