Mark Karpeles the former CEO of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has been arrested in Tokyo.
In a statement, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police said that they believed 30-year-old French national Karpeles had “unjustly inflated the balance” of an account in his name by manipulating Mt. Gox transaction records. “He created false information that $1 million had been transferred into the account, when in fact it had not been.”
The New York Times reports:
On Saturday, the Japanese police arrested Mark Karpeles, the head of the exchange, which was based in Tokyo, on suspicion that he had used the popular online financial platform, which he developed, to illicitly add $1 million to an account under his control.
But the arrest, and the small amount of information divulged by Japanese law enforcement officials, shed little light on the larger mystery of the missing Bitcoins.
Before it filed for bankruptcy in February of last year, Mt. Gox said 850,000 Bitcoins, mostly belonging to its clients, had been either lost or stolen by hackers, an amount worth more than $450 million at the time. The company also said it had lost $27 million in cash.
Mt. Gox later said it had recovered 200,000 of the missing Bitcoins from an overlooked part of its computer systems. With its accounting in disarray, however, it said it could not be sure what had happened to the rest, or even verify exactly how many Bitcoins it had actually held to begin with.
Read the full article on NyTimes.com
