The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has concluded its investigation into missing text messages from former chair Gary Gensler’s phone, finding that “avoidable errors” led to their loss.
The Office of Inspector General (OIG) examined how nearly a year of text messages between October 2022 and September 2023, a period when the SEC was actively pursuing crypto enforcement actions, were permanently deleted.
According to the report released Wednesday, the SEC’s IT department mistakenly applied an automated policy that triggered a full wipe of Gensler’s government-issued phone. This erased all stored text messages along with operating system logs.
The situation was worsened by poor oversight: weak change management, the absence of reliable backups, ignored system alerts, and unresolved vendor software flaws. Because the IT team failed to properly collect and preserve log data, investigators could not determine why Gensler’s phone stopped syncing with the SEC’s mobile device management system.
SEC Text Loss Raises Questions Over Crypto Enforcement Records
The OIG found that some of Gensler’s deleted texts related to SEC enforcement actions against crypto companies and their founders. This means key details about how and when the agency pursued cases may never be fully known to courts, Congress, or the public.
Investigators reviewed about 1,500 messages recovered from colleagues and other records. They concluded that most were federal records, with roughly 38% of the recovered conversations deemed “mission related,” directly involving SEC senior staff at the time.
At the same time Gensler’s messages were vanishing, the SEC was cracking down on the use of messaging apps. Several global investment banks and financial firms were charged with breaking record-keeping and books-and-records requirements under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
