Turkey Investigates Sam Bankman-Fried, Seeks Seizure of ‘Suspicious’ FTX Assets

Add Turkey to the list of countries investigating Sam Bankman-Fried — or SBF — founder of the failed cryptocurrency platform FTX.

PYMNTS reported earlier this month that authorities in Turkey were already investigating FTX’s local arm in the wake of the company’s collapse.

However, the country’s Financial Crimes Investigation Board, also known as MASAK, now says it is looking to seize “suspicious assets” connected to the company and is investigating Bankman-Fried, according to a notice on its website.

MASAK said its investigations have shown that customer trust was “not duly preserved” by FTX, and that investigators have a “strong suspicion of crime” being committed by Bankman-Fried, the company’s former CEO. FTX did not immediately respond to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

FTX Turkey is one of 134 companies under the FTX umbrella seeking bankruptcy protection following the firm’s collapse earlier this month.

Soon after the company filed for bankruptcy, reports emerged that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was investigating the company’s downfall and its handling of its customers’ funds.

They join officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in looking into how FTX handled customer funds while attempting to prop up its sister trading company, Alameda Research.

Meanwhile, regulators in several countries — among them Australia, Japan and the Bahamas, where FTX is headquartered — have all taken action against the company.

FTX’s bankruptcy hearing began last week with James Bromley, acting counsel to FTX’s newly installed leadership team, calling the crypto exchange’s situation “unprecedented” during his opening remarks.

“We have probably witnessed one of the most abrupt and difficult corporate collapses in the history of corporate America,” he said.

And while this collapse has sent shockwaves through the crypto world, it does not have to mean the end of the industry, PYMNTS wrote recently.

“For one, FTX’s over-leveraged empire was not in fact a decentralized, Web3-native enterprise,” we noted. “It was simply a cut-and-dry overleveraged financial empire of the Lehman Bros. variety. FTX and SBF alone controlled both the exchange’s trade order books and users funds.”

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