Mt Gox's Mark Karpeles arrested in Japan

French-born Mark Karpeles, head of the failed Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange, has been arrested in Japan. The arrest comes eight months after Japanese police said they were confident the incident that saw most of the Bitcoin held by Mt Gox evaporate was the result of fraudulent transactions. Karpeles had previously claimed the lost …

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

There's an AMA on Reddit from a person who claims to have worked for Mt Gox: I'm Ashley Barr, A.K.A "Adam Turner", the first Mt.Gox employee, and alleged DPR (:/). AMA

Some solid comedy gold in there.

Around the same time, we learned that Mark only had one bank account, shared with Mt.Gox's customer deposits.

or

...when I finally gathered a small group of employees to pressure Mark into answering how we spent more money than we've made, his answer was simply:

"My grandmother lives in a castle in switzerland"

Amusingly, Mark Karpeles was tried and convicted in absentia of various frauds in France in 2010, well before before any of this blew up.

[Pascal Monett]

In other words, he is hardly innocent

Nice read, that link. I always thought Karpeles was incompetent, now I know he is also prone to criminal behavior. Mixing one's personal money with customer money is a total no-no in any business.

Hell, even the Mafia doesn't do that.

[h4rm0ny]

Re: In other words, he is hardly innocent

Well actually all we now know is that someone on Reddit claims to be somebody specific. Is any of this recorded in testimony anywhere? It might be true, it might not. OP correctly wrote claimed, you've jumped to "we know".

[BigFire]

Re: In other words, he is hardly innocent

In criminal world, co-mingling your fund with your customer's fund does not result in prison sentence. You get tortured and shot and burned.

[Sebby]

Well, yes. Hopefully people will stop giving their money to random strangers on the Interwebs for safekeeping and look after it themselves after this. Not hard, and there are wallets that expressly avoid holding the keys in the clear (notably, blockchain.info).

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

The way that's written reads like a recommendation for blockchain.info.

These are the clowns that were using numbers from random.org to generate private keys, and not even catching the fact that they were getting a 301 error from random.org's webserver instead.

[Tim Worstal]

"Around the same time, we learned that Mark only had one bank account, shared with Mt.Gox's customer deposits."

If true then he'll do jail time for that alone.