by Ed Berger and Whitney Webb at Unlimited Hangout
In late November, Protos began demystifying the mysterious ties of the bankrupt and fraud-riddled cryptocurrency exchange FTX to “a small bank in rural Washington,” known as Farmington State Bank. Given that it has only 3 employees and is one of the smallest banks in the entire United States, Protos noted that “the fact that [this bank] somehow finds itself embroiled in the largest cryptocurrency fraud in history is puzzling, disconcerting, and totally out of place, to say the least.”
While the Protos piece sheds some light on Farmington State Bank and its recent transformation into FBH Corp. and Moonstone Bank, there is more to the story. Despite being a small, rural bank, Farmington/Moonstone, since at least 1995, has had ties to some of the most covert and criminal offshore financial networks of the modern era, with connections to intelligence-linked financial fraudsters of considerable notoriety.
In this Unlimited Hangout investigation, we pick up where Protos left off and begin lifting the curtain behind the FTX financial labyrinth in an effort to piece together the networks behind the elaborate crypto Ponzi scheme. This is critical work, as the FTX bankruptcy proceedings have been oddly manuevered so to avoid revealing who aside from Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO and face of FTX, had control of the exchange and its subsidiaries. The network behind Farmington/Moonstone, the subject of this piece, is the first of many threads tied to FTX that we hope to pull on in the coming weeks and months.
Archie Chan Finds Farmington
Farmington, a sleepy rural town in Washington state,…
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