
CFTC åtalar Avraham Eisenberg i Mango Market Exploit
- CFTC stämde Avraham Eisenberg, en digital artist, för två anklagelser om marknadsmanipulation relaterade till Mango Market-exploat.
- It claims that Eisenberg “engaged in a manipulative and deceptive scheme to artificially inflate the price of swaps offered by the DeFi platform.”
- Gretchen Lowe uppgav att tillsynsmyndigheten kommer att använda alla tillgängliga tillsynsverktyg för att aggressivt driva åtal för bedrägeri och manipulation.
On January 9, the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against Avraham Eisenberg, a self-described digital artist, for two charges of market manipulation related to last year’s major exploit of decentralized financial platform Mango Markets. Eisenberg is currently in police custody after being detained on related charges on December 27.
Enligt to the regulatory agency, between October 11, 2022, and October 15, 2022, Eisenberg “engaged in a manipulative and deceptive scheme to artificially inflate the price of swaps offered by Mango Markets, a decentralized digital asset exchange, culminating in the misappropriation of over $100 million from the platform.”
Moreover, the self-described digital artist allegedly purchased more than 400 million MNGO-USDC swaps on Mango Markets with a position size of around $19 million. The CFTC claims that the defendant then purchased “large quantities” of MNGO tokens on the Oracle Exchanges over a span of less than 30 minutes.
The rise in the price of MNGO was advantageous to Eisenberg, who borrowed cryptocurrencies worth around $144 million from Mango Markets at a higher price. After this, the price of Mango Market’s native token fell, leaving the platform illiquid. The CFTC stated that the artist’s actions resulted in a “wash transaction.”
Acting Director of Enforcement Gretchen Lowe stated that CFTC “will use all available enforcement tools to aggressively pursue fraud and manipulation regardless of the technology that is utilized. The CEA prohibits deception and swap manipulation, whether on a registered swap execution facility or on a decentralized blockchain-based trading platform.”
Tillsynsmyndigheten hävdade vidare:
“The goal of Defendant’s scheme was straightforward: to artificially inflate the value of his swap contract holdings on Mango Markets through price manipulation, so that he could ‘borrow’ a significant amount of digital assets that he had no intention to repay.”
However, the defendant’s manipulation led to an illusion about the value of his collateral. In order to stop manipulating MNGO and the MNGO-USDC Swaps after “borrowing” digital assets from Mango Markets, the defendant transferred the borrowed digital assets out of his Mango Markets account.
Värdet på hans MNGO-USDC-swappar föll samtidigt som priset på MNGO sjönk under dess nivå före manipulation. Detta resulterade i att svarandens lån blev allvarligt undersäkrade, vilket lämnade Mango Markets med en nästan tom hand.
I en tweet den 15 oktober 2022 erkände Eisenberg att han låg bakom attacken på Mango Markets och hävdade att hans handlingar var berättigade. Eisenberg har tidigare gjort ett anonymt krav på en buggpremie på 70 miljoner USD Coin (USDC), eller $70 miljoner. Mango Markets-communityt röstade emot att driva rättsliga åtgärder mot honom till förmån för låta honom behålla $47 miljoner.
“All mango depositors will be made whole. By voting for this proposal, mango token holders agree to pay off the bad debt with the treasury, and waive any potential claims against accounts with bad debt, and will not pursue any criminal investigations or freezing of funds once the tokens are sent back as described above,” read the governance proposal.
Det är intressant att notera att Eisenberg den 27 december greps av det amerikanska justitiedepartementet och anklagades för ett fall av råvarubedrägeri och ett fall av råvarumanipulation. CFTC har anklagat honom för att ha brutit mot Commodities Exchange Act och flera andra kommissionsbestämmelser.