The country’s Financial Crimes Investigation Board, known locally as MASAK, has seized the assets of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried following the bankruptcy of his core business.
An official statement from Turkey’s MASAK outlines the preliminary findings and measures taken against Bankman-Fried following bankruptcy proceedings for its core business. MASAK began investigations on November 14.
Cointelegraph translated MASAK’s latest announcement, which highlighted three key points from the research.
The Turkish investigative body found that FTX failed to securely store user funds, embezzled client funds through suspicious transactions, and manipulated supply and demand in the market by causing clients to buy and sell listed cryptocurrencies that they were not backed by actual cryptocurrency holdings.
As a result of these findings, MASAK seized the assets of Bankman-Fried and its affiliates after finding strong “criminal suspicions” at the aforementioned points.
The FTX TR website is still active, but only displays a message to users with instructions to receive account balances. Users are asked to share the IBAN information and Turkish ID number of their respective Turkish lira accounts through a link.
A LinkedIn post by FTX TR noted that the exchange had more than 110,000 users and processed an average monthly transaction volume of between $500 million and $600 million since the launch of its mobile app in early 2022. The company employed 27 people. .
The post also noted that the company had made efforts to transfer users’ FTX TR balances to their bank accounts.
FTX TR was led by a former Binance executive who previously managed the global growth of the business in Turkey, the CIS and the EU. Cointelegraph has contacted the former head of FTX TR to find out if the local operation was aware of its parent company’s improper trading activities and will update this article accordingly.
According to a local media report, the FTX website was attracting an average of 187,000 unique monthly visitors from Turkey, the sixth highest number per country.
FTX is now in bankruptcy proceedings under the new CEO John Ray III. The man responsible for untangling Enron’s infamous collapse in the early 2000s described the FTX debacle as the worst he had seen in his professional career.
A strategic review of FTX’s global assets is currently underway as part of the bankruptcy proceeding to maximize recoverable value for stakeholders.
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