Former Mt. Gox CEO Arrested for Theft of Bitcoin
posted Sunday Aug 2, 2015 by Nicholas DiMeo
It's been over a year since we've discussed the Mt. Gox fiasco on our publication. It was mainly because the story became dull and a little redundant, with the value of Bitcoin rising and falling each day from news of another potential breach that never came about. But there was always one interesting piece of the story, and that was about all of the missing Bitcoin that was never recovered and how it got "lost" in the first place. We may have an answer to that, as the former CEO of Mt. Gox, Mark Karpales has been arrested on suspicion of stealing them.
Arrested this week in Japan, Karpales has been charged with falsifying records and exchange transactions. Tokyo police say that he manually adjusted his own account on Mt. Gox to show he had over $1 million in Bitcoin at a certain point. Considering Karpales has had prior run-ins with the law in relation to theft and fraud, this may come as no surprise to some, especially with the majority of people in the investigation agreeing on a theory that the missing Bitcoin was an inside job.
Karpales has since gone on record to deny the accusations, telling the Wall Street Journal that they were "false" and he would "of course deny" the charges against him. Neither official police spokespeople nor Karpales' attorneys have commented on the matter and the news around the arrest is a little blurry. The good news is that he can now be tried in court to determine if he in fact did steal the coins. The bad news is that a lot of people are still out a lot of money, thus going to show the ongoing instability in the digital currency.
