Hours Before His Arrest, FTX’s SBF Denied Being Part of ‘Wirefraud’ Chat Group

SBF’s last tweet before his detention for allegedly conducting wire fraud was denying his participation in a group chat dubbed “Wirefraud.”

Only hours before his arrest by Bahamas police, Sam Bankman-Fried rushed to Twitter to deny his role or knowledge of the “Wirefraud” private group chat, which purportedly featured former FTX and Alameda officials.

Bankman-Fried used Twitter on December 12 to deny involvement in or knowledge of a “Wirefraud” group chat on messaging app Signal, which reportedly included members of Bankman-inner Fried’s circle, including FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang, FTX engineer Nishad Singh, and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.

According to the AFR investigation, the conversation was used to communicate classified information regarding FTX and Alameda’s activities in the run-up to their collapse.

Bankman-Fried, on the other hand, said on Twitter that if the group chat was “real,” he “wasn’t a member” and was “very certain it’s simply fake” since he had “never heard of such a group.”

Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to testify remotely before a United States House Committee hearing on December 13 to explain the collapse of the FTX exchange, but he was arrested by Bahamian officials on December 12 and is likely to be extradited to the United States.

Committee Chair Maxine Waters subsequently announced on December 12 that he “would not be able to hear” his evidence at the House Committees hearing because of the arrest.

According to a Dec. 12 joint statement from Senators Sherrod Brown and Pat Toomey, Bankman-Fried was also requested to attend a separate hearing with the Senate Committee on Banking on Dec. 14, but had never confirmed his attendance, and his lawyers had reportedly refused to accept a subpoena compelling his testimony.

In written evidence before to his appearance before the House Committee hearing, Chief Restructuring Officer and FTX CEO John Ray said that FTX customer assets were “commingled” with Alameda’s.

Ray said that Alameda “used client assets to participate in margin trading, exposing customer funds to enormous losses,” and that the trading firm’s business model forced it to transfer those funds to “different […] exchanges that were intrinsically dangerous.”