by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack
SDNY COURTHOUSE, Aug 11 – Shakeeb Ahmed was arrested at 6 am on July 11 and appeared in court at 3 pm on crypto fraud charges. Indictment on Patreon here.
Inner City Press was there, in the Magistrates Court of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, when Ahmed was brought in by U.S. Marshals, wearing shorts and a t-short emblazoned "I [two-screens] CODE." Thread here.
The SDNY prosecutors agreed to release Ahmed on bond, only $100,000 of it secured by cash, to live in his luxury apartment on 57th Street. This stands in contrast to the detention of Avi Eisenberg, and Miles Guo.
On July 14, District Judge Victor Marrero set the next conference for August 11.
Inner City Press went to the nearly empty courtroom; threadette:
Shakeeb Ahmed has 3 lawyers and is wearing a suit, not "I CODE" T-shirt he wore at arraignment.
All rise!
Judge Marrero: Tell me about discovery...
AUSA: We turned over Google subpoena returns. We seized over 20 devices, we are imaging them and Ahmed's laptop from his former employer.
Defense: We got 90 gigabytes this morning. We'd like until October.
AUSA: Oct 20.
Judge Marrero: 2 pm. Adjourned.
The prosecutors summarize: "In July 2022, AHMED carried out an attack on the Crypto Exchange by exploiting a vulnerability in one of the Crypto Exchange’s smart contracts and inserting fake pricing data to fraudulently cause that smart contract to generate approximately $9 million dollars’ worth of inflated fees... The Crypto Exchange was incorporated overseas and operates on the Solana blockchain... AHMED laundered the millions in fees that he stole from the Crypto Exchange to conceal their source and ownership, including through (i) conducting token-swap transactions, (ii) “bridging” fraud proceeds from the Solana blockchain over to the Ethereum blockchain, (iii) exchanging fraud proceeds into Monero."
The case is US v. Ahmed, 23-cr-340 (Marrero / Lehrburger)
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