FTX’s sister hedge fund, Alameda Research, lost at least $190 million of its trading funds due to arguably avoidable scams, according to a former engineer at the firm.
In an Oct. 12 post to X titled “The Hacks,” former Alameda Research engineer turned whistleblower Aditya Baradwaj claims that the firm’s “breathtaking” agility led to “major security incidents” as often as every few months.
Incident #1:
An Alameda trader got phished while trying to complete a DeFi transaction by accidentally clicking a fake link that had been promoted to the top of Google Search results
Cost: $100M+
Postmortem: Implemented extra checks on our internal wallet software
— Adi (e/acc) (@aditya_baradwaj) October 11, 2023
In an example of one of the biggest exploits, Baradwaj claims a trader at Alameda once lost more than $100 million of the firm’s funds after clicking a malicious link promoted to the top of Google Search results.
The trader was attempting to sign off on a decentralized finance transaction, said Baradwaj.
In another example, he said Alameda was yield farming on a new blockchain of “questionable legitimacy” — a move that saw the trading firm eventually rack up losses of more than $40 million.
Baradwaj wrote that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried…
