Bahamian attorneys pursue access to FTX data of international customers

Published at: Dec. 10, 2022

Authorities across the globe are fighting against time to bring justice to the millions of people impacted by the financial frauds committed by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. As part of the ongoing investigations, attorneys representing the Securities Commission of the Bahamas seek access to FTX’s database with international customer information.

The Bahamian attorneys filed an emergency motion with a Delaware bankruptcy judge requesting access to FTX’s customer database to aid their ongoing investigations. The motion highlighted previous failed attempts to access the defunct crypto exchange’s database. As a result, the lawyers claimed that FTX employees and counsel prevented authorities from getting critical financial information.

The database in question is reportedly stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Portal databases, which include personal information such as wallet addresses, customer balances, deposit and withdrawal records, trades and accounting data. According to the lawyers, the U.S. bankruptcy proceedings will "suffer no harm or hardship if this relief is granted."

While AWS was used to store customer information, FTX used Google services as an analytics platform for data of users residing outside of the United States. According to the filing sourced by CNBC:

“While the Joint Provisional Liquidators are happy to engage in dialogue with the U.S. Debtors, their refusal to promptly restore access has frustrated the ability of the Joint Provisional Liquidators to carry out their duties under Bahamian law and placed FTX Digital’s assets at risk of dissipation.”

The latest domino effect of FTX fraud was felt by media outlet The Block, which had failed to disclose funding from Alameda Research. The Block CEO Mike McCaffrey stepped down from his position after failing to disclose $27 million loans from FTX's sister firm Alameda Research.

On Dec. 7, the new management team of FTX reportedly hired a team of financial forensic investigators to track down the missing customer funds exceeding $450 million in cryptocurrencies.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, the forensics firm is tasked with conducting “asset-tracing” to identify and recover the missing digital assets and will complement the restructuring work being undertaken by FTX.