Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) took to Twitter just hours before reports of his arrest by Bahamian police to deny any involvement in or knowledge of a secret group chat called “Wirefraud” that allegedly included former FTX and Alameda ranking executives.
FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang, FTX engineer Nishad Singh, and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison were reportedly included in a “Wirefraud” group chat on the messaging app Signal. In a Dec. 12 response to an AFR report, Bankman-Fried used Twitter to deny knowledge of or participation in the group chat.
SBF denies being a part of Wirefraud that send secret information
According to the AFR report, the chat was used to transmit top-secret information about FTX and Alameda’s operations in the months before the company’s collapse.
However, SBF claimed on Twitter that he “wasn’t a member” of the group chat if it were “true” and that he was “quite sure it’s just false” because he had “never heard of such a group.”
Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to appear remotely before a United States House Committee hearing on December 13 to discuss the failure of the FTX exchange, but he was detained by Bahamian authorities on December 12 and is likely to be extradited to the United States shortly after.
His testimony at the House Committee hearing “will not be able to hear” due to the arrest, Committee Chair Maxine Waters later confirmed on December 12.
According to a joint statement from Senators Sherrod Brown and Pat Toomey on December 12, Bankman-Fried was also asked to attend a different hearing with the Senate Committee on Banking on December 14 but had never confirmed his attendance, and it was also reported that his lawyers had reportedly refused to accept a subpoena compelling his testimony.
John Ray, the chief restructuring officer and CEO of FTX, claimed that FTX customer assets were “commingled” with Alameda’s in written testimony provided prior to his appearance at the House Committee hearing.
Alameda “used client funds to participate in margin trading that subjected customer funds to massive losses,” according to Ray, and the trading firm’s business model needed it to deploy those funds to “various […] exchanges that were inherently unsafe.”