But the funds that Alameda had spent were no longer easily available, so the company used FTX customer funds to make the payments. Besides her and Mr. Bankman-Fried, she said, two other people knew about the arrangement: Mr. Singh and Mr. Wang.
Keeping this arrangement from the rest of Alameda / FTX, including legal and compliance, strongly implies they knew it was fraudulent.
Agree with your point on (2) that it could technically mean admin DB access.
From Reuters:
This also sounds more like an explicit backdoor built into a system, but not totally conclusive.