A Bot Named Willy: Did Mt. Gox's Automated Trading Pump Bitcoin's Price?
There is more speculation today that bitcoin's November 2013 surge and Mt. Gox's trading volumes were built in part on fraudulent trading activity - specifically via a bot that serious traders have dubbed "Willy". Bitcoin's price on Mt. Gox rocketed from around $200 in early November to its $1,236 all-time high on 4th December, exciting early adopters and causing analysts to go into fits over the cause: was it Chinese speculation on that country's fee-free exchanges? Or perhaps a mass exodus to digital currency after its resistance to government seizure was noted during the Silk Road....
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In the latest report from WizSec, a Tokyo-based security firm, conclusive evidence has been found of insider trading and price manipulation at the defunct Mt. Gox exchange. The report states this price manipulation started in February 2013 when the price was around US$25 and continued all the way until February 2014 when the price crashed from its all time high above US$1,000. The report concludes that 570,000 BTC were bought in the period between February and November and that this definitely had a meaningful impact on price. WizSec corroborates the findings of the original Willy report,....
Tokyo-based Bitcoin Security Specialists Wizsec recently published a protracted report, revealing the suspicious behavior of Mt. Gox trading bot Willy. Due to their non disclosure agreements with the official investigators, the private investigation firm revealed only a handful of details which they believed were "safe" enough to made public. In their censored dispatch, Wizsec elaborated how Willy bought a large number of Bitcoins (around 250,000 BTC) within a specific period. This buyout reportedly was the ultimate source of 2013's famous rally towards $1000 mark. The following graph from....
Tokyo-based security firm WizSec has released a preliminary analysis of suspicious trading data leaked from now defunct bitcoin exchange Mt Gox. The exchange suspended its operations in February last year and was subsequently declared bankrupt in March, having lost around 850,000 BTC (more than $450m at the time). Since last November, bitcoin exchange Kraken has worked alongside authorities to support the investigation on behalf of creditors. Meanwhile, WizSec has been working to track Mt Gox's bitcoin transactions in an unofficial capacity. WizSec's release follows the Willy Report, the....
Like penny stocks traded on the NYSE or those on pink sheets, cryptocurrency is a prime target for pump and dump scams. For those with buying power, it's an easy way to get rich quick by inflating the price. For everyone else, nine out of ten times, you will lose. This is one of several reasons people are afraid to trust Bitcoin. For those of you who don't know how the pump and dump works, it's fairly straight forward. They are also illegal in the market, though federal agencies do not actively protect Bitcoin users. Pump and dump scams involve two groups of people. First there are the....
In the months following the collapse of Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, the bitcoin community is still struggling to understand what brought the oldest and once-largest exchange to its knees. How did it lose so much money? Where did it go? They're answers we're very much looking for, but a new report published at The Willy Report raises even more questions, particularly surround the exchange and its relationship to the price of bitcoin. The report spotlights two trading bots that were spotted by community members last year, given the names "Willy" and "Markus". Both bots would purchase somewhere....