FTX customers around the world will undoubtedly regret their decision to sign up with a cashless cryptocurrency exchange. Adding insult to injury, they are now the targets of fraudsters posing as the US Department of Justice.
Police in Singapore on Saturday warned of a website pretending to be run by the DOJ—and claiming to be helping FTX users get their money back. The site instructs visitors to log in with their FTX username and password. Then it says they can get their money back after paying the fine.
“The site may be a fraudulent website based on login information,” police said, according to Channel News Asia.
FTX went into shock this month after it was hit with $6 billion in withdrawal requests in three days – the equivalent of a bank account. It filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, the same day that founder Sam Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO. Calls for stricter regulation of the cryptocurrency sector have increased significantly due to its collapse.
Under new CEO John J. Ray III, the company has begun a prudent review of the global economy as part of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. Ray was also involved in cleaning up the mess after the Enron crisis, which former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers compared and the FTX fiasco.
This week Ray said he had never seen “the complete failure of corporate governance and the absence of reliable financial information” as he had seen at FTX.
“The whole project was run by a group of kids in the Bahamas,” a person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk on condition of anonymity.
Such comments offer little encouragement to FTX customers who have been sent into panic after their FTX assets have been frozen. But it provides opportunities for those who want to take advantage of their desperation.
In Singapore, retailers are not the only ones who have been burned by FTX. State-owned Temasek issued a statement this week saying its stake in the crypto exchange was now worthless. It did a quick eight-month period on FTX, it said, including a financial review that showed the company was profitable. He invested $210 million in FTX International and $65 million in FTX US.
“While writing about our investment in FTX will not have a significant impact on our overall performance,” it wrote, “we will closely monitor the losses and learn from them.”
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