The U.S. federal government on Wednesday charged three people with a yearslong phone hacking conspiracy that culminated in the infamous theft of $400 million from FTX as Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange was collapsing.

In an 18-page indictment filed in D.C. court, prosecutors accused Robert Powell, Carter Rohn and Emily Hernandez with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and identity theft in their operation of a SIM swapping ring that targeted fifty victims between March 2021 and April 2023.

Their most notable heist came on Nov 11, 2022, when the trio siphoned $400 million from an unidentified company. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that company was FTX.

They gained access to an employee of the crypto exchange through AT&T and transferred out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto.

The charges offer a solution to one of the most vexing questions left in the FTX saga: what happened to hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto that disappeared in the exchange's darkest hour, right after it filed for bankruptcy protection.

FTX FTX Collapse Hack

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.