The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating Mango Markets exploiter Avraham Eisenberg over his role in extracting $114 million from the decentralized finance platform.
In a lawsuit dated Monday, the CFTC claims that Eisenberg “engaged in a manipulative and deceptive scheme to artificially inflate the price of swaps offered by Mango Markets […] culminating in the misappropriation of over $100 million from the platform” in October.
According to the filing, Eisenberg “purchased over 400 million MNGO-USDC Swaps on Mango Markets with a position size of approximately $19 million.” He then bought "large quantities" of Mango’s MNGO coin on three Oracle exchanges.
This caused MNGO's price to jump from $0.04 to $0.54 and allowed Eisenberg to "borrow"—or drain—the protocol of all available liquidity. This included $114 million of Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether. As a result, Mango Markets was left “holding a mostly empty bag.”
After returning $67 million to the platform, Eisenberg revealed he was a part of a group that simply "operated a highly profitable trading strategy.”
The U.S. Justice Department arrested Eisenberg on December 27th, however, and charged him with one count of commodities fraud and one count of commodities manipulation.
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