FTX tried a lawyer, Thai prostitutes and finally a bribe to get frozen funds unlocked, witness says

Libertarians and questionable behaviour when it comes to money, name a more iconic duo.

They're all bad at it. This one wasn't stroking the right people to get away with it.

I’m not surprised at how bad they are at it. These are highly educated rich people who think they’re smarter than they are. They probably think of crime as how stupid people without ethics get money. And so they cannonballed into white collar crime they believe that things like intelligence are just scalar values that they have a lot of. They aren’t going to think of all the little tricks you learn on small scale stuff.

Also a lot of their crimes are just reenactments of why finance laws exist but with crypto. Because they think it’s special since they got rich doing arbitrage but with crypto and they think they’re special visionaries. They’re pure ego, and often were rewarded for it.

if the funds were frozen by the exchange how would having someone's identification tied to a (retail?) trading account have helped them?