Just over a month after a bankruptcy judge approved FTX's reorganization plan, and about two years after the exchange's collapse, the FTX estate has filed some 25 adversary lawsuits against various entities in an attempt to claw back funds for creditors.
Several of the noteworthy individuals include SkyBridge Capital CEO and onetime Trump administration official Anthony Scaramucci, the developers behind the game Storybook Brawl, a notorious trader who repeatedly exploited FTX, and Deltec Bank chairman Jean Chalopin, among others.
The adversary suits attempt to claw back funds transferred by FTX under founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to the various entities with the general justification that FTX was insolvent throughout the relevant period, starting from at least early 2019. The adversary suits contend that FTX's investments in the various cases, excluding the exploiter, were worthless or the amounts invested were disproportionate to the value gained.
FTX is suing Anthony Scaramucci and his SkyBridge Capital fund for over $100 million to recover a variety of investments directed by Bankman-Fried into Scaramucci's properties, including several SkyBridge funds and a sponsorship for Scaramucci's SALT conference, arguing Scaramucci had "...correctly identified Bankman-Fried as someone willing to spend money while asking very few questions."
The suit also claims that Scaramucci and his partner Brett Messing, who is also named in the lawsuit, sold off some bitcoin and Solana tokens that SkyBridge had purchased through an investment from FTX—an investment that "made no economic sense from FTX’s perspective", the lawsuit claims—without proper approval. "At today’s prices, those tokens are worth in excess of $120 million," the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit seeks to reclaim $12 million from the SALT sponsorship, $55 million from two investments in Scaramucci entities, and damages from the sale and breach of contract regarding the sold off bitcoin and Solana. The lawsuit also seeks to disallow a $45 million bankruptcy claim made by SkyBridge, which the suit says "asserts a claim for the same $45 million it has already received" as part of Bankman-Fried's investment into SkyBridge.
FTX is also suing Nawaaz Mohammad Meerun and naming him as the individual behind a number of high-dollar exploits on the FTX platform, including one involving the illiquid coins BTMX and MobileCoin, and alleging that Meerun profited over one billion dollars from various manipulations of the exchange.
"Upon information and belief, Meerun has been linked to money laundering operations and Ponzi schemes dating back more than a decade, and has extensive ties to Polish, Romanian, and Ukrainian organized crime networks, including groups linked to human trafficking, as well as to Islamic extremist networks linked to terrorist financing," the lawsuit states.
"Meerun also has continued to engage in cryptocurrency-related exploits even after FTX’s collapse, most recently using the alias “Humpy the Whale” to execute a governance attack on another cryptocurrency lending program in June 2024," the lawsuit adds, referring to the Compound governance attack previously covered by The Block, which was cited in the lawsuit.
Meerun repeatedly targeted FTX to manipulate the prices of illiquid tokens, often using different accounts with food-centric pseudonyms, from "[email protected]" to "[email protected]," the lawsuit states. Meerun targeted tokens including BTMX and MOB; BAO, TOMO, and SXP; and KNC.
The lawsuit seeks to recover hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned off the platform by Meerun in what the lawsuit claims is a violation of the platform's terms of service. It also seeks to claw back nearly $30 million in transfers made during the preference period before bankruptcy and to disallow two bankruptcy claims Meerun had filed totaling over $13 million.
That's right—FTX's most notable exploiter filed his own bankruptcy claim for $13 million left on the platform, "filed using his own name, address and KYC information," according to the lawsuit. Meerun was "apparently not satisfied with the hundreds of millions of dollars he exploited from the Debtors through his fraudulent pre-petition conduct," the lawsuit pointedly states.
Best known as Bankman-Fried's supposedly second-favorite game, after League of Legends, Storybook Brawl was a fantasy-themed "auto battler" video game acquired by FTX in 2022.
According to a new lawsuit, the game's developer Good Luck Games (GLG), which was "led by Bankman-Fried’s godbrother and certain of his childhood friends," received a $25 million investment from FTX, "followed by millions more in salaries and 'bonuses,' all paid in purported exchange for a single video game that was never formally launched and did not even progress beyond beta-testing."
"Although GLG never actually progressed past beta-testing Storybook Brawl or formally brought it or any game to market, Defendants continued to collect payments from WRS up through FTX’s bankruptcy, including approximately $2 million in salary and purported bonuses over more than eight months—thereby essentially doubling their outsized annual salaries," the lawsuit states.
Though in March 2023 a co-founder of GLG attempted to buy back the game from FTX following its bankruptcy, the offer of $1.4 million was not accepted, and the game officially terminated development in April 2023. The lawsuit is seeking to reclaim over $24 million in connection with the GLG investment.
Bahamian bank Deltec and its chairman Jean Chalopin has already been hit with a class action lawsuit for its work with FTX. Now, FTX is going after Chalopin for an investment of $11.5 million FTX made into a holding company owned by Chalopin in exchange for a 10% interest in the company, which owned Farmington State Bank, another defendant listed on the lawsuit.
Despite the fact that Farmington was the nation’s 28th smallest bank by assets and its reported net worth was $5.7 million, according to the lawsuit, FTX invested double that amount for just a 10% interest.
Following the investment, Farmington rebranded as Moonstone, a bank aimed at "the evolution of next generation finance," which began courting crypto business and even hired Chalopin's son as Chief Digital Officer. However, once federal authorities seized $50 million of FTX's capital held in the bank, the bank attempted to revert back to its original branding, though it had allegedly violated regulatory restrictions in the meantime.
"Farmington’s assets were sold and it was ultimately directed by the Federal Reserve Bank to wind down, rendering the FTX Group’s investment worthless, or at minimum, significantly devalued," the lawsuit states. The lawsuit seeks to reclaim the $11.5 million invested in the bank.
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