According to The Block, the New York Federal Court will begin hearing the criminal fraud and manipulation charges against Avraham Eisenberg on Tuesday (9th), reviewing his alleged actions in profiting 116 million US dollars by exploiting the Solana ecosystem decentralized finance platform Mango Markets. The trial is expected to last for two weeks.
While Eisenberg confirmed that he and his team planned an attack on Mango Markets in October 2022, he claims it was just a “high-profit trading strategy” that legitimately utilized the protocol’s design.
The strategy involved Eisenberg manipulating oracle price feeds to boost the price of Mango’s native token MNGO, using the inflated tokens as collateral to obtain approximately 116 million US dollars worth of cryptocurrency loans, leading to insolvency on the platform. Eisenberg later negotiated with Mango DAO, agreeing to return 67 million US dollars.
Eisenberg was arrested in December 2022 and charged by the US Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In the US, telecommunication fraud charges may carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.