FTX CEO Promises to Refund $6M to Phishing Victims, Goes After Attackers

    Sam Bankman-Fried has been leading the news headlines lately, after users of his exchange FTX suffered from a massive phishing scam attack, resulting in $6 million loss in digital assets.

    In a series of tweets, Bankman-Fried suggested that the culprits (whose addresses he also published in the thread) should send 95% of the stolen amount back – unless they want serious persecution. 

    15) Anyway — maybe a time to try out the 5-5 standard on the 3Commas/phishing scammer!

    If they send back ~$5.7m (~95%) of the scam within 24h to 0xD15ff86129c3Da57756b33827DfFF6D252602284, we’ll absolve them.

    — SBF (@SBF_FTX) October 23, 2022

    He also took a chance to remind the community about his own take on crypto regulation standards, largely implying centralisation and accountability for platforms. 

    The attack affected another platform, 3Commas: a security update published by 3Commas confirmed that API keys linked to newly-created 3Commas accounts were used by criminals to execute the unauthorized trades. The platform’s impersonators were able to commandeer users’ APIs to compromise linked FTX accounts. 

    Bankman-Fried made it clear that he would refund the FTX users who lost their money for phishing scheme: 

    “THIS IS A ONE-TIME THING AND WE WILL NOT DO THIS GOING FORWARD.

    THIS IS NOT A PRECEDENT.
    We will not making a habit of compensating for uses getting phished by fake versions of other companies”