US Court Freezes Assets of Mt. Gox CEO

jfruh writes "Mt. Gox has managed to enter court-protected bankruptcy in the United States, but Gregory Greene, who lost $25,000 in the bitcoin company's collapse, has convinced a court in Chicago to freeze the assets of Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles and two companies associated with him. 'Money is moving around as we speak, bitcoins are moving around accounts associated with Mt. Gox,' said Greene's lawyer. 'Something is not right so we urgently need to get to the bottom of this quickly.'" The Mt Gox stole the missing bitcoins theory.

Comments

Interesting parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

In Japan, MtGox is not liable because bitcoins aren't money (i.e. nothing real was lost).

Re:Interesting parallel

[Lendrick]

It would be a delicious irony if people were able to recover some of their lost value due to government regulations.

Re:Interesting parallel

[pla]

In Japan, MtGox is not liable because bitcoins aren't money (i.e. nothing real was lost).

MtGox tracked account balances in both BTC and USD. Bitcoins may have no legal value, but wouldn't Gox remain on the hook for the dollar-denominated balances in their care?

Re:Interesting parallel

[JcMorin]

The government did seize twice 5 millions in cash from Mt. Gox banks account. Giving back this money would be a good start.

good move

[globaljustin]

MtGox has had this coming. They need to provide answers.

I don't see this as anything other than routing criminal proceedings.

Re:good move

[PRMan]

Karpeles has 200,000 BTC in an address that he has proven he has control over in the past. There's nothing to wonder about. He stole the coins (at least 200,000 of them).

I don't think for a second that Karpelès stol

[Anonymous Coward]

He has shown honesty and good morals before (alongside his imperfect entrepreneurship). I think it's either about a grave accident (such as losing private keys) or a US govt. instance having pulled string in Japan, having seized their assets. Karpelès said (confirmed) already days ago in response to an internal discussion that "the US govt. doesn't want us to talk about it", which makes me believe it's indeed about seized assets, and that it's connected to the misguided suspicion that they had something to do with Silk Road.

Oh So NOW you want regulation eh?

[bobbied]

So, let me get this straight. You want the government to order that the CEO of Mt Gox not have access to his assets? Yea, good luck with that.

If he was the one who took all the BitCoin from their depositors, what's to keep him from trading them? Nothing, really. Remember that BitCoin is unregulated by design.

Give it a rest, you lost your money and nobody can prove where it went. Oh the joys of an unregulated currency.

Re:Oh So NOW you want regulation eh?

[DarkOx]

Give it a rest, you lost your money and nobody can prove where it went. Oh the joys of an unregulated currency.

Give it a rest, you gave your money to Madoff. He lost it and nobody can prove where it went. Oh the joys of a regulated currency.

Good news though you also got to caught up a bunch of money in Taxation to support the SEC that didn't save you...

A test of the principles

[Rinisari]

So this is actually a test of the one of the attractive principles of Bitcoin: no one can separate you from your money, assuming that you control your private keys. Karpeles isn't a complete idiot, so I'm certain the keys to what balance he himself maintains are safely stored somewhere only he knows (brain wallet?). So, assuming that he has substantial holdings in bitcoin, then what good does the asset freeze do? He is free to spend bitcoin, unless the asset freeze also prevents businesses from accepting money of any kind from him.

Same holds for the two companies, but they are much more likely to have a larger USD balance that is actually affected by the freeze.