Case Studies

FTX was a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and Gary Wang. At its peak in January 2022, the exchange was valued at approximately $32 billion. FTX collapsed in November 2022 after reporting by CoinDesk revealed that Alameda Research - a trading firm also controlled by SBF - held a significant portion of its balance sheet in FTT, FTX's own token.

The revelations triggered a liquidity crisis. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced the sale of Binance's FTT holdings, accelerating customer withdrawals. FTX halted withdrawals and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 11, 2022. Court-appointed CEO John J. Ray III - who had previously overseen the Enron liquidation - described FTX's corporate controls as a "complete failure."

Investigations revealed that billions in customer deposits had been diverted to Alameda Research for speculative trading, venture investments, political donations, and personal expenditures. Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas in December 2022, extradited to the United States, and convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023. He was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison in March 2024.

Wirecard AG was a German payment processor and financial services company that joined the DAX 30 index in September 2018, replacing Commerzbank. The company claimed to process electronic payments for approximately 300,000 merchants worldwide. Investigative reporting by the Financial Times, led by journalist Dan McCrum beginning in 2015, raised persistent questions about the company's accounting practices, particularly regarding third-party acquiring operations in Asia.

On June 18, 2020, auditor Ernst & Young refused to sign off on Wirecard's 2019 annual accounts after being unable to confirm the existence of €1.9 billion in cash balances purportedly held in trustee accounts at two Philippine banks. Both banks subsequently stated that no such accounts existed. CEO Markus Braun resigned on June 19 and was arrested on June 22. The company filed for insolvency on June 25, 2020.

COO Jan Marsalek fled Germany and remains a fugitive subject to an Interpol Red Notice. Criminal proceedings against Markus Braun and two co-defendants began in Munich in December 2022, representing the largest financial fraud trial in German post-war history. The German Bundestag established a parliamentary committee of inquiry to investigate regulatory failures, particularly BaFin's controversial decision to ban short-selling of Wirecard shares rather than investigating the fraud allegations.

The Lazarus Group is a state-sponsored cybercrime organization attributed by the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and multiple cybersecurity firms to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The group, also tracked as APT38 by security researchers, has been linked to some of the largest cyber-enabled financial thefts in history, spanning traditional banking systems and cryptocurrency platforms.

Early operations included the 2014 destructive attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment and the 2016 attempted theft of $951 million from Bangladesh Bank via fraudulent SWIFT messages, of which $81 million was successfully exfiltrated. In 2017, the group was attributed as the source of the WannaCry ransomware attack that affected over 200,000 systems across 150 countries.

Since 2020, the group has increasingly targeted cryptocurrency platforms. The March 2022 Ronin Bridge hack - which drained approximately $620 million from the Axie Infinity gaming network - was confirmed by the FBI as a Lazarus Group operation. The United Nations Panel of Experts has reported that proceeds from these operations fund the DPRK's weapons of mass destruction programs. The U.S. Treasury's OFAC has designated Lazarus Group and associated cryptocurrency addresses.

The Panama Papers represent the largest data leak in history at the time of publication. In 2015, an anonymous source - identified only as "John Doe" - contacted the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and provided 11.5 million confidential documents from the internal database of Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm specializing in the creation of offshore shell companies.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which coordinated a global investigation involving over 370 journalists from 76 countries. The findings, published on April 3, 2016, revealed that Mossack Fonseca had created more than 214,000 offshore entities for clients including heads of state, politicians, FIFA officials, and individuals subject to international sanctions.

The political consequences were immediate and far-reaching: Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned within days of publication; Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified by the Supreme Court in July 2017. Multiple countries launched tax evasion investigations, and global reforms to beneficial ownership transparency were accelerated. Mossack Fonseca announced its closure in March 2018. The ICIJ was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2017.