Yesterday (Monday), the prosecution in New York submitted a letter to Hall in the Manhattan District Court, after discovering, according to her, that twice in the last two weeks – on January 29 and February 12 – he surfed the Internet using VPN services. This is a service that encrypts the surfing and transmits it through a company that prevents any other party from tracking the surfer and knowing who he is and where he comes from.
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Today (Tuesday), at the hearing held following the trial before Judge Louis Kaplan, who is in charge of the case, the lawyer for the prosecution, Daniel Sassoon, said that “the government does not dispute that many people use VPNs for good reasons – but there are also a number of possible concerns” in SBP’s use of such a service. “For example, some people are known to use VPNs to disguise the fact that they are accessing foreign crypto exchanges that use IP addresses to block American users.” That is: the prosecution suspects that SBP holds some of the money that disappeared from FTX, the crypto exchange that he founded and managed until last November, on an exchange abroad, and uses the service to withdraw the money covertly.