Customers owed $1.9 billion oppose efforts by government lawyers and media organizations to unseal FTX usernames.
As part of the crypto exchange’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, a group of non-U.S. FTX customers are attempting to have their names and private information removed from court documents.In a Dec. 28 joinder filing,“The Ad Hoc Committee of Non-US Customers of FTX.com” (Ad Hoc Committee) stressed that publicly revealing the names and private information of customers runs the potential risk of identity theft, targeted attacks and “other injury.” It said:
“Requiring the Debtors to disclose the FTX.com customers’ names and other identifying information to the general public would cause irreparable harm, further victimizing the FTX.com customers whose assets were misappropriated.”
There may be a lot more persons in the group than the 15 individuals that make up the group individually or as a whole. The Ad Hoc Committee asserts to speak for individuals or organizations with a total of $1.9 billion in assets locked in FTX.com.
A joinder is a sort of court file in which many lawsuits have been consolidated or a new party has joined an existing filing. The “Motion of Debtors for Entry of Interim and Final Orders” in this case attempts to withhold personal customer information, among other things, and the Ad Hoc Committee is jumping on it. The filing reads
“The Ad Hoc Committee submits this Joinder in support of the Redaction Motion’s request to redact names and all other identifying information of the FTX.com customers from any paper filed or made publicly available in these proceedings, including the Creditor Matrix, Consolidated Top 50 Creditors List, and Schedules and Statements,”
However, the U.S. Trustee has already objected to the initial motion, stating that the public has a “general right of access to judicial records” and that withholding information could jeopardize the openness of FTX’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
Publications including The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times have even demanded that the material be made public, stating that this is how these types of bankruptcy procedures generally go. WSJ journalist Andrew Scurria wrote on Dec. 29:
“Bankruptcy courts normally require transparency into the affairs of troubled businesses, including their creditors, in return for the protections of Chapter 11,”
To the horror of the cryptocurrency community, a similar situation already happened in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Celsius, with court filings revealing sensitive information about thousands of consumers back in October.
