Hours before news broke of his arrest by Bahamian police, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) denied he had been involved in or knew of a secret group chat called "Wirefraud" that allegedly involved the former FTX and senior Alameda executives.​

In a response to an Australian Financial Review (AFR) report, SBF used Twitter to deny involvement in or knowledge of a "wire fraud" group chat on messaging app Signal, which reportedly included internal members of SBF, including FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang, FTX engineer Nishad Singh and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.

The AFR report stated that the chat group was used to send secret information about FTX and Alameda’s operations prior to the crash. However, SBF responded on Twitter that if the group chat was “real,” he “wasn’t a member” and was “pretty sure it was fake” because he had “never heard of such a group.”

As previously reported, SBF had only recently confirmed that he would participate remotely in the December 13 hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee to explain the collapse of the FTX exchange, but on December 12, SBF was formally arrested by the Royal Bahamas Police Force. (Cointelegraph)