Half of the funds are expressed in SOL, totaling more than 8.6 million dollars.
Cryptocurrencies are allegedly linked to bribes authorized by Sam Bankman-Fried.
The United States Department of Justice initiated legal action to seize approximately $16 million in cryptocurrency from a Binance account, following a year-long investigation.
According to the demandreviewed by CriptoNoticias, these cryptocurrencies are supposedly linked to bribes authorized by Sam Bankman-Friedwho was the founder of FTX, one of the largest bitcoin and crypto asset exchange platforms in the world before its collapse.
The US justice detailed that the Binance account in question, created in November 2021, contains a variety of digital tokens. Among them are 143,000 Internet Computer (ICP) tokens, 21,000 from Avalanche (AVAX), 7,660 from Ripple (XRP), 3,940 from Cardano (ADA) and 43,137 from Solana (SOL). Of these, more than half of the total account value is in SOL, representing approximately 8.5 million dollars.
The value of these cryptocurrencies has seen a notable increase recently. This rise has been influenced by several factorsincluding the push for ETFs based on bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as the context of the presidential elections in the United States, where Donald Trump emerged victorious.
The origin of the case
The case pointed out by the Department of Justice dates back to an incident in November 2021, where it is alleged that Bankman-Fried ordered the transfer of 40 million USDT from a wallet associated with Alameda Research to initiate a bribery scheme targeting Chinese officials.
The goal was to release nearly $1 billion in cryptocurrencies held in two Chinese exchanges. Since that year, the funds moved through several private wallets. The transactions, according to the filing, ended up in a Binance wallet between December 2021 and December 2023.
Authorities noted patterns of suspicious transactions, with “almost daily” deposits of stablecoins and BTC that They were quickly converted into other cryptocurrencies.
They demand $1.8 billion from Binance
In a similar vein of events, the administrators of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX took Binance to court in the United States, claiming 1.8 billion dollars which they consider were obtained illegally.
For this reason, they went to the federal court in the state of Delaware, known for its specialization in business bankruptcy cases. In their complaint, they accuse Binance of having resold 20% of their stake in the latter’s capital to FTX for $1.76 billion in July 2021, at a time when FTX should have already been considered insolventas reported by CriptoNoticias.
Responding to the lawsuit, Binance stated that FTX’s allegations “They have no merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
This article was created using artificial intelligence and edited by a human Editor.