The Mystery of the $400 Million FTX Heist May Have Been Solved
When greater than $400 million price of crypto was mysteriously pulled out of the coffers of what was as soon as the world’s greatest cryptocurrency change, FTX, on the very day that it declared chapter in November of 2022, many initially suspected insiders on the firm—together with, doubtlessly, then CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, now convicted of fraud. But clues left throughout blockchains over the previous yr recommended as an alternative that exterior thieves had chosen a very inconvenient second throughout FTX’s meltdown to tug off an infinite heist.
Now, new clues revealed in a US Department of Justice indictment counsel one thing much more stunning: Some of these suspected thieves seem to have been within the United States and have now been arrested.
An indictment filed final week particulars fees towards three folks—Robert Powell, Carter Rohn, and Emily Hernandez—who’re accused of working a large cybercriminal theft ring. The group, which authorities say was often known as the “Powell SIM Swapping Crew,” allegedly used SIM swaps—tricking cellphone firms into switching a consumer’s cell phone registration to the thieves’ SIM card in order that they’ll acquire entry to authentication codes despatched to the sufferer’s cellphone—to steal a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} from victims’ accounts.
Most notably, the gang is accused of siphoning $400 million in digital forex from the accounts of an organization—named within the indictment solely as Victim Company-1—on the night time of November 11, 2022, persevering with into November 12. As first noticed by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, that can also be the precise timing of FTX’s theft, which the corporate itself has pegged at between $415 million and $432 million in stolen crypto.
The blockchain evaluation agency Elliptic corroborated Krebs’ inference that the $400 million theft described within the report is sort of definitely the FTX heist. “We are not aware of any other thefts from crypto businesses on this scale, on these dates,” Elliptic wrote in a weblog publish. “It therefore appears likely that FTX is the ‘Victim Company-1’ named in the indictment.”
FTX did not instantly reply to WIRED’s request for touch upon whether or not it’s the SIM-swapping sufferer described within the indictment.
If the indictment does, actually, describe the FTX theft—and given the relative rarity of nine-figure crypto thefts and the precise timing of this one—then the charging doc reveals key particulars about how the FTX heist was pulled off. It describes how Powell allegedly requested Hernandez to focus on a particular cellphone quantity for SIM-swapping. According to prosecutors, Hernandez then obtained a faux ID along with her photograph however the title of her sufferer—doubtlessly an FTX staffer—and introduced it at an AT&T retail retailer in Texas to show her id as she requested that the staffer’s account be transferred to her personal cellphone.
That allowed the group to hijack messages meant for the sufferer, together with authentication codes for his or her account, in keeping with the indictment. Given that these codes often signify a second-factor authentication mechanism required after a consumer enters their username and password, it’s not clear how these different credentials may need been stolen, although cybercriminals usually acquire them by means of phishing, credential-stealing malware, or making an attempt credentials leaked in different database dumps and doubtlessly reused throughout accounts.
