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Me: [turning to guy at gas station] so the polycule was mostly in the dark about the fraud. SBF had back door access
— Ed Zitron
Guy: [pulling out taser from under seat] is that right
“Attorney-1” was a bad boy
John Jay Ray III, the CEO of FTX in bankruptcy, has released a second interim report detailing how FTX skirted bank secrecy laws and commingled funds — and how an FTX lawyer, “Attorney-1,” served as Sam Bankman-Fried’s fix-it and hatchet man. [Report, PDF]
(We covered the first interim report, which came out in April, here.)
“Attorney-1” is very obviously Daniel Friedberg, who was FTX’s compliance officer and Alameda’s general counsel. A day after Ray released the interim report, FTX filed suit against Friedberg, alleging malfeasance in the course of his duties. The complaint details many of the same incidents in the report. [WSJ; redacted complaint, PDF]
In 2008, Friedberg was a colleague of Stuart Hoegner at Ultimate Bet, where the pair helped cover up a multi-million-dollar scandal in which the site cheated its players. Hoegner now works for Tether, a dubious stablecoin issuer.
SBF hiring Friedberg should have been the first clue that FTX.com was a massive fraud.
Friedberg resigned around the time the FTX Group filed for bankruptcy. Weeks later, he met with the FBI, the DOJ, and the SEC and told them he wanted to cooperate with any investigations.
There’s an interesting line in the interim report:
The Debtors have identified on Attorney-1’s hard drive a final copy of the false written testimony that Bankman-Fried provided to Congress.
FTX has access to the hard drive from Friedberg’s computer. Did Friedberg just leave the evidence behind when he quit FTX? Or did he willingly hand over his laptop to FBI agents? This hard drive seems to have had all sorts of interesting documents on it.
Friedberg hasn’t been charged with any crimes as yet — but based on Ray’s report and the ensuing lawsuit, we wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a sealed indictment out there waiting for him.
Following the money
FTX owes $8.7 billion in customer funds — over $6.4 billion of which is cash and stablecoins. According to Ray, Friedberg lent a helping hand when FTX executives “used commingled customer and corporate funds for speculative trading, venture investments, and the purchase of luxury properties, as well as for political and other donations designed to enhance their own power and influence.”
Ray details what he found about various FTX accounts and the flows of cash in and out of them. Tracking money flows was “extraordinarily challenging”:
… from the inception of the FTX.com exchange, the FTX Group commingled customer deposits and corporate funds, and misused them with abandon … Commingling and misuse occurred at their direction, and by their design.
Ray and his team have recovered $7 billion in “liquid assets” so far, which is astounding — though we’re not sure how liquid the crypto component of that will be in practice, or how much is unsaleable FTT tokens.
The report does not include FTX in Japan, Cyprus, or Singapore — areas where funds were properly segregated by law. It also does not address FTX.US, which Ray says is still under investigation.
No, no, it’s research
FTX lied to banks — a lot. Alameda Research had “research” in its name so that it could get bank accounts without immediately being flagged for enhanced due diligence as a money services business. FTX couldn’t get banking, so they used Alameda bank accounts to receive customer cash, right from the start.
But banks started asking inconvenient questions. When “Bank-1” — likely either Signature or Silvergate — asked why FTX was sending money to Alameda, an Alameda employee told them that “customers occasionally confuse FTX and Alameda” but that all wires through the account were to settle trades with Alameda.
This was false. In just 2020, one of Alameda’s accounts received more than $250 million in deposits from FTX customers and more than $4 billion from other Alameda accounts that were funded in part by customer deposits, says the report.
When banks started rejecting wires to Alameda accounts, FTX set up North Dimension so it could continue to funnel money to FTX. Friedberg and SBF told “Bank-1” that North Dimension was a crypto trading firm with substantial operations. In fact, it was an empty shell with no employees or operations.
Friedberg also engaged his old law firm to create a fake corporate register for North Dimension for the bank: “Specifically, after Bank-1 asked for a copy of the register, Attorney-1 directed a law firm to create a register.”
Time travel by document
In 2021, FTX Trading Ltd was planning to go public. As part of the paperwork for that, it needed an audited financial statement.
The problem was that from April 2019 when FTX.com first launched until the end of August 2020, FTX.com customers had been sending cash deposits to Alameda bank accounts. FTX needed to cover up the fact that they were just using Alameda to move customer and company funds around without any agreement to do so.
So in January 2021, Friedberg had his old law firm draft a “cash management agreement” to explain why Alameda held FTX cash. Friedberg created from this a fake “Payment Agent Agreement.”
FTX usually signed documents with DocuSign to provide an electronic record. In this case, to avoid a DocuSign timestamp, SBF wet-signed the document on behalf of Alameda and FTX on April 16, 2021 — backdated to 2019 “for the sole purpose of providing it to an external auditor.”
How did Ray’s team know the document was backdated? They found the original document file on Friedberg’s hard drive:
While metadata reflects that Attorney-1 created the Payment Agent Agreement on April 12, 2021, and that the executed version was last modified on April 16, 2021, the agreement purports to have an “Effective Date” of June 1, 2019 —nearly two years earlier.
The IPO never happened — but the fake document did help the FTX companies get more funding from “potential investors in connection with its $400 million Series C financing that closed in January 2022.”
Sam the philanthropist
SBF was famous for his Effective Altruism. He used FTX funds by preference:
The Debtors have been able to identify certain transactions that appear clearly to have been funded in part with commingled customer deposits. These include political and “charitable” donations, venture investments and acquisitions, and the purchase of luxury real estate for senior FTX Group employees in the Bahamas.
Sam’s charitable donations got a bit esoteric. The FTX Foundation gave one guy $300,000 to “Write a book about how to figure out what humans’ utility function is” — a question that LessWrong rationalist philosophy needs to answer so as to construct the perfect superintelligence to rule over us all. And that hopefully won’t turn out to be Roko’s basilisk. [LessWrong, PDF, 2004]
The Foundation gave someone else $400,000 to make YouTube videos to promote LessWrong rationalism and Effective Altruism.
Closer to home, the Foundation gave $20 million to the Guarding Against Pandemics PAC, which was run by Sam’s younger brother Gabe Bankman-Fried.
FTX sues Friedberg
Friedberg’s malfeasance was egregious enough that FTX is suing him for “damages caused by breaches of fiduciary duties, legal malpractice, and other wrongdoing, and to recover fraudulent transfers.”
The suit also alleges Friedberg paid off whistleblowers rather than deal with the compliance issues they raised.
Friedberg worked at FTX from 2017 until its collapse in 2022, the last 22 months of that as general counsel at Alameda and chief compliance officer at FTX. Joe Bankman, SBF’s father, pushed Sam to hire Friedberg and keep him “in the loop … so we have one person on top of everything.”
FTX paid Friedberg millions of dollars in salary and bonuses, and tens of millions in crypto — a $300,000 salary at FTX.US, a $1.4 million signing bonus, an 8% equity stake in FTX.US, and a $3 million payment from Alameda.
Plaintiffs want compensatory damages to be determined at trial, disgorgement of all of Friedberg’s compensation including the cryptos, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees.
Chief noncompliance officer
Friedberg’s putative job as chief compliance officer was to make sure the proper checks and balances were in place to prevent fraud, commingling of funds, and other wrongdoings. Per the complaint, he didn’t do any of that. Instead, “Friedberg actively participated in and facilitated such misconduct.”
Money was funneled to FTX insiders and booked as “personal loans” — which were never repaid, and which there was never any serious discussion of paying — “despite Friedberg’s false statement to the outside accountants that interest was paid quarterly on the loans.” Friedberg was involved in more than $2 billion in such “loans.”
Friedberg also encouraged the use of Signal for corporate messaging, preferably set to make messages disappear.
Ray is still appalled at how bad FTX’s accounting was:
Those entities that did produce financial statements used QuickBooks, Google documents, Slack communications, Excel spreadsheets, and other inadequate means for measuring the level of assets and liabilities held by the FTX Group. Entries in QuickBooks were often made months after transactions occurred, rendering real-time financial reporting and risk management impossible.
Hush money
Friedberg served as SBF’s fixer. He paid off whistleblowers and “retained” whistleblowers’ attorneys — that is, he paid them off too.
In November 2019, FTX and Alameda were hit with a class action lawsuit that accused the companies and their executives of racketeering and market manipulation. [Docket; Decrypt, 2019]
The lawsuit doesn’t name “Plaintiff’s Attorney-1” — but this is clearly Pavel Pogodin, who set up Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement for the sole purpose of filing crypto class actions.
Alameda said at the time: “The troll has no evidence of any wrongdoing, and will not further discover any — because there was no wrongdoing to discover evidence of.” [Medium, 2019]
Nevertheless, Friedberg took the suit seriously enough that he paid Pogodin off. (The details are redacted.) The suit was dismissed in December 2019.
As a California Bar member of flawless repute, Pogodin is happy to be paid not to do anything. He sent a letter in January 2022 threatening further possible action against FTX. Friedberg offered him “$1.6 million and $50,000 paid on a monthly basis.”
In sum, Friedberg arranged for the FTX Group to pay Plaintiffs’ Attorney-1 $3,320,000 through July 2022. Upon information and belief, Plaintiffs’ Attorney-1 provided no actual legal services to the FTX Group after signing the engagement letter.
An FTX.US employee on a $200,000 salary was fired after less than two months. She sent a demand letter in December 2021 claiming that “Alameda [was] nothing more than an extension of FTX, used to bolster investor confidence in FTX projects, and in turn drive up the prices of projects FTX had developed or invested in itself” and let employees insider-trade.
Friedberg gave this employee an “extraordinary settlement” (redacted in the filing) — and made a $12 million deal to retain Whistleblower-1’s attorney. Their only work for FTX was a three-page memo.
In early 2022, an attorney working at FTX for less than three months discovered that Alameda owned North Dimension. He flagged to Friedberg that North Dimension accounts were being used to fund FTX customer withdrawals and that Alameda didn’t have the proper money transmitter licenses.
Friedberg promptly fired him. The complaint details how the attorney was paid a large (redacted) severance package.
Other FTX news
John Ray’s team has so far racked up $200 million in fees — and the fee examiner thinks this is quite reasonable. Gotta pay the undertaker: [Bloomberg; summary report, PDF]
Without question, the fees incurred to date are remarkable, but so is the professionals’ performance. The Fee Examiner has been struck by the creativity, professionalism, and personal sacrifice of the Retained Professionals who sprung into action in November to begin transforming a smoldering heap of wreckage into a functioning Chapter 11 debtor-in-possession.
Over in the criminal case, SBF moved to dismiss 10 of the 13 charges against him. Judge Lewis Kaplan has told SBF to get knotted: “The Court has considered all of the arguments of the parties. To the extent not addressed herein, the arguments are either moot or without merit.” [Doc 136, PDF; Doc 148, PDF; Doc 149, PDF; NYT; Doc 167, PDF]
Sam wants to blame his troubles on Fenwick & West, the law firm used by FTX and Alameda, who apparently told him that all the hamfistedly obvious crimes he did were all totally legal. The DoJ and FTX objected, and Judge Kaplan has again told Sam to get knotted: “Neither Fenwick nor the FTX Debtors are part of the ‘prosecution team,’ and the government has no obligation to produce materials that are not within its possession, custody, or control.” [Bloomberg; Doc 150, PDF; Doc 151, PDF; Doc 151-1, PDF; Doc 156, PDF; Doc 159, PDF; Doc 166, PDF]
Over at Lightcone, who build and run LessWrong and the Effective Altruism Forum: “Funding is quite tight since the collapse of FTX.” They’re asking the users for $3 million to $6 million over the next year. [LessWrong]
Amy Castor 
