FTX Hacker Moves $120M Amid Sam Bankman-Fried Trial: Report

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried testified that anonymous exchanges were moving large amounts of assets off FTX's platform.

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic reported on October 12 that up to 72,500 Ether (ETH) of stolen assets were recovered from FTX for the first time since the exchange was hacked in November 2022.

According to Elliptic, the thief converted $120 million worth of ETH to Bitcoin (BTC) on multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) THORSwap starting September 30, 2023.

The first exchange transactions took place just days before the Bankman-Fried trial began on October 3. At the time of the hack, the amount converted was $87 million, or 18% of the total stolen amount of $477 million.

The FTX hacker applied similar laundering techniques to the November 2022 deployment.

“The 180,000 ETH that was not converted to Bitcoin through Renbridge lay dormant until the early hours of September 30, 2023 – at which time it was worth $300 million,” Elliptic wrote in its new report.

Elliptic reported that the FTX hacker lost $94 million in the days following the hack as the attacker rushed to harass the funds through decentralized exchanges, chain bridges and hashing.

Related: FTX Hacker May be Using SBF Test as Smoke Screen: CertiK

Nearly a year after the hack, the identity of the FTX thief remains unknown, Elliptic said. The Blockchain Analytics firm suggested three possibilities for who could be behind the FTX theft: FTX insider operation, North Korea's Lazarus Group, and Russian-linked criminal groups.

“Some FTX employees may have had access to the business's crypto assets to move them for operational reasons. In the chaos surrounding the company's bankruptcy and collapse, an insider actor may have taken these assets,” Elliptic's report says.

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