Jake Thacker in Portland Ore. had about $70,000 worth of investments in his account on FTX. He may have lost it all.
Smith and a wave of other investors scrambled to try to withdraw billions of dollars from FTX after panic spread that the company was on shaky ground. But with a run on the exchange underway, FTX froze accounts, quickly filed for bankruptcy, and now many customers could lose some or all of their money.Terri Smith is an architect in the Seattle area who was semi-retired and working part time.
Nick Howard didn't think he was making speculative bets on crypto. He worked for an overseas startup video game company that he said preferred to pay him in a cryptocurrency called USDT that's supposed to just match the value of the U.S. dollar. "I feel like I am in the middle of, you know, a trauma response," Howard says."It's kind of a numb feeling for me right now."Nick Howard says his employer paid him in cryptocurrency. He's afraid he's lost about $16,000 worth of paychecks that he had in his account on FTX."Roughly $70,000 dollars in FTX when it all came crashing down," he says.
"The company is short $8 billion dollars," Gerstein says."And there's only two conceivable categories of explanation for what happened to that $8 billion. The first is they traded it in speculative investments and lost it."There's also this. There are also reports that hackers may have stolen several hundred million dollars of customers' money amidst the frantic wave of customer withdrawals.