Missing Mt Gox Bitcoins Likely an Inside Job, Say Japanese Police
Japanese newspaper readers began the year with bitcoin as front-page news. The disappearance of 99% of the bitcoins missing from Mt Gox can be blamed on internal system manipulation and not any external attack, a major Japanese newspaper has claimed. Citing an unnamed source connected to the ongoing police investigation, Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper led with the story on the front page of its New Year's Day edition. Only 7,000 BTC, or 1% of the total 650,000 missing, could be attributed to hacking attacks from outside the company, it said. Yomiuri did not elaborate further on the....
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The joint Japanese and American government investigation into the whereabouts of supposedly stolen Mt. Gox bitcoins has announced a key discovery. The Japan News, Japan's largest English language newspaper, is reporting that fraud is the cause of the "disappearance of 99% of Mt. Gox bitcoins." According to sources in the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), only about 7,000 Gox bitcoins were lost due to cyber-attacks. The remaining 99% of the missing 650,000 bitcoins is "highly suspected" of disappearing during a period when Mt. Gox was being fraudulently run by an unknown party. Also....
I have, like many others, written extensively about the Mt Gox debacle and the missing bitcoins. Too many questions lie unanswered and seem to be most likely to remain unanswered. Jonathan Keane, writing today on VPN Creative has stated that: Tokyo Metropolitan Police have finally launched an official investigation into the collapse of Mt Gox and the question of the missing bitcoins, abet, several months after the event. Mark Karpeles, the CEO of Mt. Gox, has claimed that a series of alleged hacking attacks led to the Bitcoin exchange, once the World's biggest, losing an alleged 850,000....
In a follow-up to the previous article in which a Japanese source claimed that the Japanese Metro Police Department was looking into additional charges against former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles for fraudulent system manipulation, sources now confirm that Karpeles has been arrested by Japanese Police. Karpeles is suspected of having accessed the exchange’s computer system and falsifying data regarding its outstanding balance. Mt. Gox Formerly claimed that the balance issue was caused by a bug, but later filed for bankruptcy, losing over 850,000 bitcoins. Since the huge loss, over 200,000....
The Bitcoin community has always speculated that Mt. Gox was insolvent before its collapse in early 2014. A new study done by WizSec now confirms this speculation. The study reports that MtGox was insolvent long before it collapsed, with thieves were routinely stealing bitcoin from the exchange’s reserves. The WizSec study also confirms that the majority of the missing Gox bitcoin was stolen by someone on the inside — echoing a report from The Yomiuri Shimbun that the coins were lost due to fraud rather than an external hack. The report cited sources at the Japanese Metropolitan Police....
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is reportedly actively investigating the disappearance of a large volume of bitcoins from the Mt. Gox exchange, which collapse disastrously earlier this year. "We decided to launch an investigation as we concluded this case could be connected to criminal activity," a spokesperson for the Tokyo Police said on the matter, according to the Wall Street Journal. When the exchange collapsed, Mt. Gox noted in bankruptcy protection filings that they estimated to have lost upwards of 800,000 bitcoins, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Several weeks....