WASHINGTON, D.C. — As chairperson of the Senate Banking and Housing Committee, Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio is listened to on Capitol Hill when he talks about cryptocurrency.

He’s long been skeptical of it and raised his concerns again at a hearing he hosted Wednesday about the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the arrest of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Brown likened him to the late fraudster Bernie Madoff.

“With Madoff and with Sam Bankman-Fried, investors didn’t ask questions for fear of missing out,” Brown said in his opening statement. “It’s a good reminder that most guaranteed investments are in fact too good to be true.”

Congress has spent the last few years trying to figure out if, and how, the federal government should regulate cryptocurrency.

FTX and Bankman-Fried burst onto the scene three years ago and had more than 2 million users in the United States when it collapsed last month.

On Tuesday, the House Financial Services Committee hosted bankruptcy expert John Ray—the company’s new CEO—to learn more about how it all unraveled.

Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty (D, OH-3) got this response when she asked if Bankman-Fried was illegally accessing his clients’ funds.

“To the extent there were rules—and there were very few—obviously they were made to be broken,” Ray testified.

Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson (R, OH-8), a crypto supporter, used the hearing to emphasize that the lack of regulation means crypto investors have little control of their money.

He asked about Bankman-Fried allegedly commingling money invested into FTX with a separate trading firm he ran called Alameda Research.

“So when customers deposited funds into their FTX accounts, where did the cash go?” Davidson asked.

“Well, sometimes the money wasn’t deposited in the FTX account. It was sent to Alameda to begin with,” Ray said.

Ray told fellow Ohio GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (OH-16), it’s also possible customer funds from FTX were transferred to Alameda to pay off loans.

“We need to investigate that further, but that’s certainly one of the paths that we would potentially find,” Ray told the committee.

Investor Kevin O’Leary, of “Shark Tank” fame, testified before Brown’s committee Wednesday.

He was a paid spokesperson for FTX and remains a crypto advocate.

“Hopefully these highly publicized events will put renewed focus on implementing domestic regulation that has been stalled for years,” O’Leary said.

Brown told Spectrum News he still doesn’t understand what the public purpose of crypto is and he wants to use his chairmanship to make sure crypto companies beyond FTX operate honestly and within a framework of rules.

“This is one company that clearly overreached and cheated people, but they’re not the only game in town,” Brown said in an interview.

Bankman-Fried faces at least eight counts of fraud.