Sam Bankman-Fried | Crypto Criminals | 4

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It's the afternoon of October 1st, 2013 in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco.

Most schools have let out for the day, so the streets are bustling when 29-year-old Ross Ulbrich steps out of his apartment.

In his backpack, he's got his laptop, ready for a few more hours of work before he calls it quits.

He's sick of being inside the apartment he shares with three roommates, so he's heading for his favorite local coffee shop.

When he gets to the coffee shop, though, it's busier than Ross was expecting.

Looking around the space, he can't see a single open table.

So although he could really go for a caffeine hit right now, he turns on his heel and heads back outside.

But Ross doesn't want to just go home.

Luckily, there's another place nearby where he likes to work.

The Glen Park Library is right next door.

And like the cafe, it's got free Wi-Fi.

So Sam walks a few feet down the sidewalk and steps inside, letting the noise of the street drop away as the doors close behind him.

He heads upstairs, making his way towards the shelves that hold the science fiction books.

There, he sits down at a desk beside a window and pulls out his laptop.

As soon as he logs in, Ross gets an instant message from one of his employees.

He doesn't know the guy's real name.

In Ross' line of work, anonymity is key, so all he can see is a screen name, Sirus.

After brief pleasantries, Sirus asks Ross to take a look at an important issue that's causing some bugs on their website.

So Ross opens up an encoded browser known as Tor and navigates to the website he built two years ago, Silk Road.

It's a modern-day black market, like Amazon, but for things like narcotics, fake IDs and hacking services.

And instead of regular payments like credit cards or PayPal, Silk Road only uses Bitcoin, the seemingly untraceable cryptocurrency.

Silk Road's made Ross a rich man.

He's taken millions in commission from over a billion dollars in sales on the site in just a couple of years.

Not that he's ever really been able to share his wealth with anyone in his life.

Various law enforcement agencies have been trying to track down who's behind the website for months, so Ross has been lying low.

He's even rigged his laptop so that once it's closed, the entire contents are encrypted.

If anyone besides him even tries to log in, everything will be erased.

But despite Ross's precautions, he's already walked into a trap.

As soon as Ross is signed in to Silk Road, a couple start yelling at each other right behind him.

When Ross turns his head to see what's up, an FBI agent rushes over to the desk, snatches the open laptop and hands it off to a colleague.

By the time Ross realizes his computer's gone and tries to grab it back, another agent's behind him and pins his arms in a bear hug.

As Ross watches on helplessly, FBI agents go through his computer, confirming that it's logged in to Silk Road, using the account of the site's infamous creator, who until today has only been known as Dread Pirate Roberts.

But now, the mastermind behind Silk Road has been unmasked, and everyone involved in the operation is certain that this will be the biggest arrest associated with the world of crypto crimes.

Because honestly, how much bigger could this thing possibly get?

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From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

In December of 2022, when Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas, it was news that made headlines around the world.

Here was a kid who'd found a way to make billions of dollars through the cryptocurrency industry.

It was the kind of fairy tales so many entrepreneurs dream for themselves.

But when Sam's fortune was threatened by the effects of his own mismanagement and a crisis in crypto, he fraudulently used customer funds to cover up a gaping hole.

And when his lies were revealed, it exposed an uncomfortable truth about the world of crypto.

There were a lot of bad actors out there.

Suddenly, many everyday investors weren't so sure that sinking their money into cryptocurrency was such a good idea after all.

And the crypto faithful, the ones who'd been all in from the start, they were just pissed that Sam had made their digital utopia look like some kind of scam, a big joke for the rest of the world to laugh at.

The thing was, though, that the crimes of Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX weren't that surprising.

For those who'd been paying attention to the world of cryptocurrency since they first arrived on the scene, Sam's story seemed to fit a familiar pattern.

Because digital currencies aren't immune to manipulation.

From being twisted and used for all manner of nefarious purposes.

Just like regular money.

And in a world where there's a way for criminals to bypass traditional methods of payment, you need investigators who are up to the task of rooting them out.

Here to talk about crypto crime and the heist inside of FTX as it was imploding is senior writer for Wired and author of Tracers in the Dark, The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, Andy Greenberg.

Andy, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Jeremy.

Glad to be here.

Thanks, man.

So how did you hear about cryptocurrency?

And on top of that, what compelled you to start reporting on it?

Well, as you kind of alluded to, I'm a writer for Wired.

I've covered this world of hackers and surveillance and cryptography for 17 years now.

And I've always found that there is a lot of story drama in online anonymity.

And I've been kind of fascinated by that and sought it out.

And I like the ways that hackers try to use anonymity tools to cover their tracks, or people on the dark web try to become someone else.

Or sometimes they actually show you as a journalist who they truly are in secret on using these cryptographic anonymity tools.

And so in 2011, I came upon what seemed to me to be a fascinating new sort of anonymity tool, which was Bitcoin.

I mean, that's how it was described to me at the time.

This is digital cash.

And you can not only use it to buy a cup of coffee, but you can put unmarked bills in a briefcase and send them across the internet to anyone in the world without revealing your identity.

And that idea of like anonymous, untraceable cash seemed to me like it was going to unlock a whole new world of online crime.

And, you know, it did in the years that followed.

I started writing about Bitcoin in 2011 when it was worth a dollar.

And very soon around that time is when the Silk Road popped up, this dark web drug market where you could buy and sell any drug, any narcotics imaginable with Bitcoin.

And it seemed to work.

It seems to be that people were doing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these black market deals and using cryptocurrency and getting away with it.

So, you know, that was my interest in Bitcoin.

It took me really almost a decade to understand how entirely wrong I was about that idea of Bitcoin.

In fact, how wrong almost everybody from those early days was, that in fact Bitcoin is the opposite of untraceable, that if you can decipher this thing called the blockchain that underpins every Bitcoin transaction, it actually is a list of every Bitcoin transaction ever made.

And you can follow the money with even more transparency than you can in the traditional finance system.

And that turned out to be this kind of incredible revelation, almost like a trap being sprung where people who thought that they were anonymous and untraceable turned out to be the opposite.

And first researchers and then the tech industry and then law enforcement figured out that they could actually follow the money, they could trace Bitcoins and other cryptocurrency directly to criminals' doorsteps.

So speaking of cybercrime, your book Tracers in the Dark, which I am reading right now and it is incredibly exciting, you're an incredibly compelling writer, I urge everybody to pick up a copy of Tracers in the Dark and give it a good solid read because it is good, man.

Thank you, Jamie.

You're very welcome.

So you talk about in Tracers in the Dark the origins of digital currencies coming out of this cypherpunk movement.

Now, cyberpunk is a genre of literature having to do with the dystopian universe, but cypherpunk is something entirely different.

What can you tell us about that movement?

So when I first came across Bitcoin in 2011, I had actually just been writing a book about the cypherpunks, which, as you say, it's not the cyberpunk.

Cypher means encryption, like a technology that you can use to scramble secrets so that only you or the person you're communicating with can decipher them and read them.

It's like secret communication.

And the cypherpunks believe that they could use encryption technologies to take power away from governments and give it to individuals.

That is where ideas like WikiLeaks came from, this idea that you can use encryption to protect your source as a journalist so that you can actually entice them to spill all sorts of secrets to you that they never would have otherwise.

But they also dreamed of basically encrypted money, like a kind of secret, anonymous, untraceable money enabled by these same encryption technologies, just like you can have untraceable and secret communications on the Internet thanks to encryption.

So when Bitcoin came along, it to a lot of people seemed like it was that kind of secret cryptocurrency.

And that's how it was described to me, by even one of the earliest Bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen, who I interviewed about it in 2011 for that first piece I wrote.

And even Satoshi Nakamoto, the person who invented Bitcoin, we don't know if it's like a he or she or they, had written in this email to a cryptography mailing list that participants can be anonymous.

So Satoshi, whoever they are, we still don't know.

It's like one of the greatest mysteries in the history of technology.

Do you think it could be more than one person?

Oh, very possibly, for sure.

I mean, Bitcoin was such a kind of flawless, incredible invention that a lot of people believe it was probably more than one person.

But the only thing that makes me think that it probably wasn't more than one person is that the secret of his or her or their identity has never leaked, and it's hard to keep a secret with more than one person.

So nobody knows.

But the cypherpunks were radical libertarians, and they believed that they could have secret communications, that the government can't penetrate.

They could even do secret black market deals with no taxation to sell stuff that the government doesn't want you to have.

All of that is part of the cypherpunk movement.

So when Satoshi popped up with this Bitcoin idea, this cryptocurrency, and says in that initial email that participants can be anonymous, a lot of them thought like, oh, it's here.

We finally have actual secret encrypted money for the first time.

So speaking of radical libertarianism, when you look at Sam Bankman-Fried, and we'll get more to him here in a minute, but I just want to ask you, you've got radical libertarianism on one end, you have effective altruism, which was Sam Bankman-Fried's jam on the other end.

It seems like it's same cereal, different spoon a little bit.

What are your thoughts on that?

I do think that the thing that ties it all together, Sam Bankman-Fried, I do not believe, wanted to use cryptocurrency to do black market deals and as a way to do straight up crime, money laundering, terrorist financing, drug deals on the intranets.

That's what the cypherpunks were thinking about.

A lot of them, we even call them cryptoanarchists.

But Sam Bankman-Fried, I think, did like the idea of a totally unregulated sphere of the financial world.

That's what appealed to a lot of people about cryptocurrency too that was different, I think, from that cypherpunk vision.

But it kind of overlaps with it because it's, you know, the people who don't like laws of any kind and the people who don't want financial regulation because they like to gamble, you know, there's a pretty big overlap there.

I guess that's kind of more what I'm saying.

It does seem like two people sitting at the same card table with different strategies, but they're both playing the same game.

They're trying to win the hand.

It's just one calls it this thing, one calls it another, but they're both running game.

I mean, that's what it seems like to me, at least.

Right.

I mean, I think that cryptocurrency held for almost all of its users this promise of something that was new and that defied the law in one way or another.

And that is definitely true of Sam Bankman-Fried, too.

And do you think that that is what Silk Road basically did in boosting Bitcoin's value?

You think it was in there as something to shake the rug up and excite the market and get people excited about it?

I mean, the Silk Road was Bitcoin's first killer app, you could say.

Like, a new technology comes out and you wait for the application of it that is going to make it suddenly feel useful and indispensable.

And it seemed like buying drugs was that for Bitcoin at first.

I mean, I think people forget that now.

But yeah, it seemed like this is a kind of cash for the Internet that isn't controlled by any bank or government.

So what are we going to do with this?

Well, why don't we use it like we have for other cash to do black market deals for stuff that you don't want to leave a trace when you buy, like heroin and cocaine and methamphetamines.

So let's put Bitcoins in the briefcase and hand that to our supplier instead of dollar bills.

Yeah, gosh, it just it's still it just it seems so strange to me.

Like, you don't want to put that on the pamphlet, right?

That's not going on the billboard for your first rollout of advertising is Bitcoin.

Use it to buy drugs.

Yeah, I think a lot of Bitcoin's early developers were kind of upset about this.

In fact, I don't even think that Satoshi Nakamoto liked the idea that Bitcoin was a black market currency.

I think that he was a libertarian, but of the kind who just wanted to, you know, create a kind of currency that governments couldn't control.

They couldn't just print as much of it as they wanted to and devalue it.

And so I think that Satoshi actually was, like a lot of early Bitcoin people, kind of upset to see that the Silk Road was suddenly painting Bitcoin as this crime coin.

But then a lot of other people were really excited about it.

And there's no question that it did contribute to Bitcoin's value, that it helped to put it on the map and to make it go from, you know, zero to one in its value, which is like a kind of magical step to take.

Let me ask you this as well.

Also in the book, you talk about the collapse of Mt.

Gox, which was an early Bitcoin exchange.

And that was largely due because someone came in and stole most of its crypto.

And then the founder, how do you say his name?

Mark Carpele?

Mark Carpelles, Carpelles.

Carpelles, all right.

So this all went down a decade before FTX went down and Sam Bankman-Fried got in trouble.

There's a lot of similarities between these two cases, but Carpelles got off a lot easier than Sam Bankman-Fried.

Why do you think that is?

Well, Mt.

Gox, so it pops up as the very first Bitcoin exchange.

It is another key ingredient in making Bitcoin viable in the early days.

It was the only way to buy and sell Bitcoin for years.

Then in 2014, it just collapsed all of a sudden and 650,000 Bitcoins went missing.

So yeah, this does sound a lot like what happened with FTX 10 years later.

A lot of people did look at Mark Carpelles, the CEO of Mt.

Gox, the same way that they look at Sam Bankman-Fried today, like this guy must have just embezzled all this money, or done something irresponsible with it, gambled it somehow.

But in fact, it was crypto-tracing.

Some of the detectives that are the subject of my book, who were able to follow that heist, to follow the money that had been stolen from Mt.

Gox through the blockchain, to trace it to its destination, and show that it actually had been stolen by a group of Russian cybercriminals.

It looked like what happened with FTX, financial impropriety.

But in fact, it was just a massive Bitcoin heist of a very traditional kind, like just a big bank robbery.

So yes, Mark Karpelis got off a little more lightly.

He actually did go to prison for a little while in Japan for financial malfeasance and running Mt.

Gox, but actually he was not the culprit.

He was the victim.

This group of hackers had stolen Mt.

Gox's money.

So it kind of makes sense that he is not the villain of that story, and the way that I think Sam Bankman-Fried is.

I find the unsung heroes of cases like this tend to be forensic accountants.

What is the law enforcement agency that people call when they notice that this kind of heist is going on?

It is a currency based heist.

So is it the Secret Service?

Is it the Treasury?

Literally an accountant?

Well, it's funny you say all this because I absolutely agree.

Like the main characters, the heroes of my book Tracers in the Dark, the Tracers in the Dark are mostly forensic accountants at IRS criminal investigations.

Like not a law enforcement body that most people think about, but the IRS does have a kind of, you know, gun toting FBI inside of it called IRS-CI.

And they are the kind of main crypto tracing law enforcement agency.

And a lot of the stories I tell, they were or alums of IRS-CI were some of the first people to point out to me that like in the midst of the FTX meltdown, there was this other crime taking place, which was a massive heist of a nine figure sum that had been taken out of FTX.

And it looked like a thief, but we still didn't know if it was Sam Bankman-Fried pocketing this money or if it was, you know, external thieves.

Only later did I start to hear from my former IRS, other crypto tracing sources, that the money was actually going through laundry services that are typically used by Russian cybercriminals.

And that was a hint to me that no, this probably was not Sam Bankman-Fried.

This is probably an actual massive theft of the same kind that affected Mt.

Gox 10 years earlier.

So I do want to ask you more about the FTX Night of Terror, essentially, here in just a second.

But first, tell us more about Tracers in the Dark and these heroes of the book.

Tell us about them.

The story of Tracers in the Dark is really about this group of detectives, like a pretty small group that figured out what took me like a decade to figure out.

They luckily figured it out a few years earlier, which is that Bitcoin was traceable.

And in fact, it served as a kind of trap for cyber criminals who thought that it was a perfect private crime coin.

And this group first like researchers and then in the tech industry and then in law enforcement, particularly the IRS criminal investigations, the people I was just talking about, they did follow the money and they used this investigative super weapon, the ability to trace cryptocurrency to take down one massive cyber criminal operation after another.

I mean, starting with the theft of half a billion dollars from Mt.

Gox, the world's first cryptocurrency exchange, and then the takedown of Alphabet, a dark web drug and crime market that was ultimately like the biggest in history, ten times the size of the Silk Road.

And finally, a child sexual abuse video network on the dark web, really like the most abhorrent kind of crime there is almost.

They were able to trace 337 users of that site and arrest them around the world and rescue dozens of children.

I mean, that's the scale of criminal operation I'm talking about here.

But in fact, just as my book was about to come out, telling these detective stories, that is when FTX melted down.

It was like days ahead of my book launch.

And in the midst of it, it turned out that there was a kind of crypto tracing crime story.

So you've finished writing your book about these huge crypto crimes, and it turns out there's another one that's happening right as you are going to print.

And you ended up writing about this for Wired, correct?

What can you tell us about what happened inside FTX that night?

Well, first, from my perspective, you know, when FTX melted down, I did not see that as my kind of story.

You know, it seemed to me like a kind of Lehman Brothers financial impropriety story.

But then, in the midst of it, suddenly $400 million at least of FTX's money had actually been stolen.

And that there was a kind of crime in the midst of this crime, as weird as that sounds.

It took me, you know, actually almost a year to get a sense of what happened in this heist.

And I really learned it not from the thieves' perspective, but from what it felt like inside of FTX.

The same day that they declared bankruptcy is when they, in a panic, started to see, I mean, FTX's own staff, the ones who were left over after the departure of Sam Bankman-Fried, after he was fired, they started to see the theft of this $400 million sum and try to react to it and protect the money.

I mean, they actually had to move incredibly quickly, take emergency, crazy measures to try to prevent it becoming a billion dollar or more heist.

And it was only because of their pretty fast action that they did stop this kind of crime in progress.

They were frantically, that entire night, trying to find where the money was going, and to stop its flow.

Okay, so what was this fast action?

How did they stop the flow, and who was taking the lead on this?

So that evening, FTX staffers, not Sam Bankman-Fried, he was out the door, start to see these hundreds of millions of dollars moving.

They can actually see it all in the blockchain coming out of their coffers.

They don't know where it's going, but they have to try to stop that outflow.

They just know they need to move their remaining funds to a safer place.

They had this emergency meeting.

Sam Bankman-Fried doesn't join it, but Gary Wang, his lieutenant, does.

They are begging Gary, who controls the keys to our wallets so that we can move all of the FTX money somewhere safer?

He actually suggests just changing the keys to the wallets, which is a terrible idea, because there is a hacker inside their network who will just grab the new key and get access to the wallet all over again.

It's like basically changing the lock to your front door when the burglar is inside the house.

Or as a locksmith.

Right, exactly.

So they have to instead figure out where we are going to actually move all of this money, and they immediately draw up a contract with this cold storage company, like a kind of company that holds large amounts of cryptocurrency offline in a super secure environment.

But the theft is in progress.

They can't wait for that contract to even go through and to have this business partnership established.

So they frantically, they just ask everybody on this Google meets conference call, I think, like who can hold this money for us right now.

And one consultant, his name is Kumanan Ramanathan.

He raises his hand and says, I have this hardware wallet in my home.

And I guess you can just move all the money to my wallet.

So they just start sending hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin to his USB drive, basically, in his home.

You asked earlier, like when a crime like this happens, what law enforcement agency do you call?

And it turns out that you call the NYPD.

You know, I didn't hear this from him.

I assembled this whole story from other sources.

But he seems to have been so terrified about the fact that he was holding this massive amount of cash basically in his home that he called the NYPD to ask for their protection as this, you know, it was like there's a crime in progress here.

There's a theft happening.

And I need officers at my home to protect this giant amount of cash.

I mean, I don't know if the people stealing this money are even going to come to my house.

You know, I actually obtained a police report from his 911 call in the middle of the night to protect this money.

Oh, bless that man.

I cannot imagine how terrifying that evening must have been, knowing that that tiny, tiny little thing that holds so much money is just in the other room.

It is like one of the bizarre things about, you know, cryptocurrency that you can hold a massive fortune, like you can have a bank on a tiny piece of silicon in your home office, and that is like kind of a superpower, but it's also a very scary situation when you know that there's somebody out there trying to steal that money.

I mean, for all the Kumanon knew, these thieves were going to like come break into his house to steal that drive.

And, you know, he ended up keeping half a billion dollars' worth of their money on that hard drive before the cold storage company actually, you know, got into gear and then they, you know, started rerouting their outflow of money into that company instead and eventually moved all of the remaining funds into these two safe places.

But poor Kumanon Ramanathan had this massive sum of money sitting in his home office on a USB drive that whole night, like freaking out until the morning when he could finally offload it to that cold storage company too.

So that is the story of how FTX managed to save the rest of its funds and only, if you can use that word, lose $400 million to hackers.

So, okay, tell me this, Andy.

Tell us this, Andy.

Did they ever catch the person, people, nation responsible?

Well, I think the answer really is, you know, I guess I should say this is innocent until proving guilty, but that they have caught a few of the culprits, but not all of them.

And by that, I mean that three Americans, not Russian cyber criminals, were arrested, or their arrest was announced, in February of this year.

And it turned out that there were these three people, Robert Powell, Carter Rohn and Emily Hernandez, who were part of this group that called themselves the Powell Sim Swapping Crew.

This is basically like a kind of hacker crew, and they seem to have been part of this cyber criminal operation, but probably, I would say they're not the masterminds.

But they were part of how the hackers seem to have gained access to FTX's network.

And the way that they did this, I mean, sim swapping, they call themselves a sim swapping crew.

A sim swap is when you basically trick a phone company into moving somebody's phone service to your phone instead of theirs.

And the reason you do that as a hacker very often is because of those two-factor authentication codes that are sent to your phone.

Now, if you have stolen somebody's password, but you don't have their phone, you usually can't break into their accounts or the network of the company where they work.

But if you can also hijack their phone service, then you can get that two-factor authentication code also.

And that seems to have been the role of these three people in the crime.

It is allegedly that they were the ones who pulled off this SIM swap.

They got a fake ID for an FTX staffer, swapped the phone service to their own phone, and grabbed that code which allowed them to break into the FTX network.

We still don't know who else was involved though.

And it does seem to me like probably this SIM swapping crew, these three Americans, were just kind of pawns in this game, I imagine, who were working with a much more professional and, I would say, a much richer group of Russian hackers who made away with the money.

So what's going to happen to these three people?

What kind of charges are they facing?

Oh, they're facing, I mean, very serious, you know, cyber criminal conspiracy charges, hacking conspiracy.

Are they facing more time than Sam is facing?

Oh, I doubt that.

I mean, very few people are.

It's kind of an irony of this case that, like, I imagine they'll be out of prison much faster than Sam Bankman-Fried will.

And that the Russians, who I still imagine, you know, I'm not sure of this, who are involved as well, will probably never see the inside of a jail cell.

And Sam, you know, this is a complicated thing, but he pulled off a kind of, like, more morally ambiguous and complex type of crime.

Whereas these people just pulled off, like, a straight-up theft, like, massive heists, you know?

And yet, they're going to be walking free, I bet, a long time before Sam Bankman-Fried.

Is there any talk, has there ever been any kind of offer put on the table to Sam Bankman-Fried to come and do what a lot of hackers and computer geniuses have done in the past when they've committed crimes, which is go to work for Uncle Sam to lighten his sentence?

You know, not that I'm aware of.

I don't know if he has the skills that they need.

Like, it's not like, you know, in some cases, the hackers have connections in the criminal underworld.

They can help, you know, rat each other out.

They can set traps for one another.

They can turn each other in.

I've seen that happen.

I've written those stories.

Sam Bankman-Fried had no criminal record, you know?

So, like, he's not actually a very good informant in that way.

Also, he was probably the main prize for prosecutors.

They didn't want to flip him for somebody else.

But he also had nothing to offer if he was flipped, because he is such a strange kind of criminal.

So, what is his superpower?

Like, what is it about him that made him so special?

There are, it seems like there are cleverer, more ill-intentioned people out there.

I would say that Sam Bankman-Fried's superpower was a kind of quantitative genius in gambling.

Unfortunately, he gambled with other people's money.

That's not legal.

It is the best kind of gambling, though.

It's probably the most fun, you know, but until you lose it all and then you go to prison.

Yeah, yeah, that's never fun.

Andy Greenberg, thank you again for joining me here today.

This has been a lot of fun and very educational.

I feel much smarter.

Well, thank you, Jeremy.

It was fun.

That was my conversation with senior writer for Wired, Andy Greenberg.

His latest book, Tracers in the Dark, is out now.

From Airship, this is episode four in our series on Sam Bankman-Fried.

On the next episode, a young woman in Tennessee sets out to improve the lives of the disadvantaged children in her community, happily destroying countless families along the way.

We use many different sources while preparing this episode.

One we can particularly recommend is Tracers in the Dark, The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details.

And while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio Editing by Mohammed Shazid.

Sound Design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Managing Producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsay Graham for Airship.