🧵1/Ω A few things about @crossriverbank, a tiny #a16z funded lender that originated more #PPP loans for "small businesses" than anyone besides Chase, BofA, and Wells Fargo, mostly for people who were not their customers.
🧵2/Ω They paid @McKinsey a bunch of money to tell the world that "while most banks originated PPP loans to their own customers, Cross River leads in originations to new customers" mckinsey.com/industries/fin…
🧵3/Ω Unlike other banks that blew up on "fund banking" recently (*cough* $SBNY $SIVB *cough*) @crossriverbank does their "fund banking" differently:
They package all the loans and sell them to weird "fintech" companies like @Upstart. @mikulaja
🧵4/Ω
100,000 #PPP / covid relief loans, mostly to new customers, processed by a super tiny bank @crossriverbank
Basically claiming to have the most incredibly skilled and fastest fraud prevention team at any bank on the planet by orders of magnitude 🚩 nytimes.com/2020/06/23/bus…
🧵5/Ω
Much like criminal mastermind Alan Lane (CEO of $SI) and noted theologian #ScottShay (president of $SBNY), the CEO is deeply religious (and wants you to know it).
🧵9/Ω
$SRAX also was just apparently de-listed from the @Nasdaq for failure to comply with filing requirements last week. 🚩 sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archiv…
🧵10/Ω @crossriverbank is also now the main banking partner for @circle of recently de-pegged stablecoin $USDC fame now that their other banks have all blown up.
🧵12/Ω
So the story of @crossriverbank has a lot of drama. It's got #BrockPierce for the pedo connection, #Tether for some Putin, what appears to be massive #PPP / covid relief fraud for the $ part...
Why not sprinkle in a little Ukraine for good measure?
🧵14/Ω
If you wonder why a tiny bank like @crossriverbank might shovel fraudulent #PPP / covid relief loans out, maybe it's because they collected ~$233 million in fees according to NYT
ps the fact that NYT took this at face value is one of many reasons it's a national disgrace.
🧵15/Ω #CrossRiverBank has biz lines other than crypto. e.g. in 2022 they loaned $105mm to a luxury condo by shady developers #Bushburg and #Moinian deep in the lowest income neighborhood in all of NYC.
"deal makes no sense" - NY RE reporters.
if economy turns loan will fail.
🧵16/Ω
CrossRiver is also one of the only banks besides @silvergatebank / $SI (R.I.P.) to make loans and take crypto as collateral.
They also marketed $WAVES / $USDN, a now collapsed fraud, to customers.
🧵17/Ω @AmerBanker: A bank originating #PPP loan fraud, doing fraudulent round robin lending with $UPST, banking crypto, and lending out actual $ for crypto collateral is "best place to work" 5 yrs in a row.
Remind you of an "innovative" energy company?
"Let us build."
🧵18/Ω
So what does the @coinbase / Cross River relationship look like? Well.
Apparently the company that shoveled out fraudulent #PPP loans is in the "compliance" business.
Does @crossriverbank still do compliance for $COIN? Because if so lol.
🧵19/Ω
By number of #PPP loans @crossriverbank was #4 in the country. But by dollar figure?
🥈 2nd 🥈
As an aside this brochure seems to be marketed at "woke" which is interesting bc their Haredi employees are among the least "woke" people on the planet crossriver.com/sites/default/…
🧵20/Ω
Apparently @KabbageInc (R.I.P.) did some actual customer facing work w/r/t the enormous number of fraudulent loan applications @crossriverbank processed.
#Kabbage got bought by #AmEx but is now under federal investigation & bankrupt
🧵24/Ω
Perhaps now is a good time to mention that a recent study found that 5-14% of all emergency covid #PPP relief funds ended up being "invested" in crypto, particularly among the less educated.
🧵25/Ω
Perhaps now is a good time to mention that a recent study found that 5-14% of all emergency covid #PPP relief funds ended up being "invested" in crypto, particularly among the less educated.
🧵29/Ω
tfw you wasted time researching & screenshooting examples that @crossriverbank's #PPP covid lending was sus af to tweet when you could have just checked the nj biz news and found out #CrossRiverBank is currently under investigation for money crimes. njbiz.com/cross-river-ba…
@crossriverbank 🧵30/Ω
So @coinbase / @circle / $USDC's bank is under investigation for money crimes (probably because it committed money crimes).
🧵31/Ω
"@crossriverbank's less hands-on approach ... may have led it to approve riskier loans... U. of Texas graph shows ~20%¹ of CRB's loans had at least 1 suspicious indicator."
🧵32/Ω
😱WOW😱 missed this part about @crossriverbank: The US Government owes Cross River $300 million (⁉️) in loan forgiveness... that it's not willing to forgive.
No wonder so many CRB #PPP loans' status is "Not Disclosed" instead of "forgiven": they have a $300m hole.
🧵33/Ω
I did a whole other thread about the Congressional report on how fintechs (including @crossriverbank) had facilitated fraudulent #PPP / covid relief loans and are now under investigation.
🧵35/Ω
One thing that's weird here is that some of these job listings come up as being for something called #CrossTheRiver but logo and address are #CrossRiverBank.
🧵1/Ω
i found a pretty fascinating trove of documents that detail one man's long and arduous 𝘬𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘧 to force #Tether to seize ~$3 million USDT that he lost to an address poisoning scam a few years back.
🧵2/Ω
Asif Ayub Patel was innocently attempting to purchase $3 million worth of gold bars from Northern Lights, a precious metals dealer based in Hong Kong that prefers to be paid in Tether, as any freedom loving Dubai resident is wont to do.
TTNRRr9jJ4sKAYExY9UryfxApFXJH2t2SJ
🧵3/Ω
Unfortunately he was careless & got pwned by an address poisoning attack: scammer sends you some crypto from an address that starts/ends w/the same characters as the address you are trying to transact with and hopes you copy/paste from recent txns w/out checking.
🧵1/Ω
Since #Israel attacked #Iran Tether has frozen 112 addresses on Tron and Ethereum.
- Collectively those wallets received ~$700 million USDT before being frozen
- The top 40 of those wallets are *all* on Justin Sun's Tron blockchain
Iranian exchanges mostly use Tron USDT.
🧵2/Ω
Dune dashboard with all the historical Tether blacklist data for those two blockchains can be found here: dune.com/queries/5342352
🧵3/Ω
#Nobitex, the largest crypto exchange in Iran (which is basically a Binance feeder fund, but I digress), openly advises its users on how to avoid sanctions via Tether USDT even though that is a blatant violation of all kinds of laws.
🧿3/Ω
it really looks like a few days before the $TRUMP launch someone borrowed all $ETH from #WorldLibertyFi treasury, sent it to a bunch of different Coinbase accounts (sus?), and then it came back from #CowSwap trades post-TrumpCoin w/e.
and if you think i'm exaggerating you haven't been paying attention. the taxpayer bailout of the crypto industry is already well underway. wpr.org/news/wisconsin…
they've already drafted the federal legislation to pump most of a trillion dollars into bitcoin under the delusional fairy tale of "paying down the national debt" (lol) lummis.senate.gov/press-releases…
🧵1/Ω
Thread for those who don't have the intestinal fortitude to sit through the Elmo / Rogan interview.
🧵2/Ω
Both these guys seem to regard the FBI asking (not forcing) "old Twitter" to take down some tweets as a crime against humanity roughly on the scale of the Stalin's gulags.
Rogan: "We were headed down a path of censorship and of control of narratives that is UNPRECEDENTED."
🧵3/Ω
The comparison to Stalin is not my hyperbole. Later in the interview Elmo will compare NY DA Alvin Bragg to Lavrenti Beria, the head of Stalin's secret police and one of history's greatest monsters.
🧵1/Ω
🇸🇻 Making a thread to collect some recent scattershot tweets concerning documents I dug up about El Salvador, Bukele, Volcano Bonds, Tether, etc. in one place.