Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mt. Gox Working With Japanese Cops; Creditors Want CEO To Testify In US

Posted by timothy on from the somewhere-someone-is-on-the-beach-with-a-margarita dept.

jfruh (300774) writes "The latest developments in the sad saga of Mt. Gox's missing bitcoins: the exchange has announced that it's working with Japanese police to try to determine who (if anyone) stole the bitcoins entrusted to Mt. Gox, resulting in the company's collapse. There are serious doubts as to Japanese law enforcement's abilities to deal with the technical issues involved. Meanwhile, Mt. Gox creditors [have rejected] Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles offer to testify in their lawsuit against him from Taiwan, and have demanded that he come to the United States."

13 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Come on over to the US for trial, we promise to treat you fairly.
    It might very well be that the mtgox CEO is corrupt, but in the current state of affairs why whould anyone trust the US government enough to go there of their free will to testify?

    1. Re:Yeah right... by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Funny

      Point of fact: he ran a bank that lost a whole bunch of people's money. If he comes here for trial, he'll probably get a bail out and a bonus.

    2. Re:Yeah right... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Point of fact: he ran a bank that lost a whole bunch of people's money.

      Point of fact: he ran something which people think looks like a bank, but wasn't.

      This is more along the line of a private company offering to hold onto your money for you.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Yeah right... by DarkOx · · Score: 4, Informative

      Which is the wost part of it. At the end of the day there was at least a period where they were accepting money and promising to deliver bitcoins he did not have and had no plan to obtain.

      Yet everyone is jumping all over this to point out: see see you have to have regulations.

      Which is bullshit. What they were doing was simple fraud. It does not matter if bitcoin is a currency, commodity, security or anything else, it does not require additional banking laws. Already a crime without any fancy securities laws, or regulators.

      Common law fraud: is the intentional misrepresentation of material facts presented to and relied upon by another party to his detriment and in order to get them to act.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    4. Re:Yeah right... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      > Enough with the Mt. Gox stories

      You must be new here. Don't you know it is Bitcoin-Wednesday!? ;-)

      --
      Microsoft Windows 8: A 64-bit compilation of 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition with 0 bit of understanding good UI.

    5. Re:Yeah right... by slew · · Score: 2

      What Mt. Gox did was not fraud in the US because they were not operating in the US as a bank, only as a money services business which is mostly only concerned with reporting to prevent money-laundering.

      What Mt. Gox did was not yet fraud in Japan because they claim it to be theft (someone stole their bitcoins) and there are currently no regulated monetary reserve requirements for such an enterprise (e.g., the mere fact that they didn't hold the bitcoins doesn't constitute fraud). However, it could turn out to be fraud, if it wasn't really theft and they did something fishy and didn't tell anyone.

      Even if Mt. Gox was a bank, just because someone bank employee is embezzling money from a bank and if the bank knows this doesn't tell anyone for a month and the bank eventually declares bankruptcy, doesn't necessarily make it fraud (even if they continue to take deposits during this time). It all depends on when the bank knew they were insolvent, not when they knew they lost some money...

      If you want a car analogy, you shouldn't generally willing hand over your car to someone that is judgment proof (e.g, no assets, no insurance), because if they lose the car, unfortunately, you are the one that has lost the car... You might try to assert that they fraudulently tricked you out of your car, but that's a loser case...

  2. Japan and technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    There are serious doubts as to Japanese law enforcement's abilities to deal with the technical issues involved.

    It's well known Japanese are technically illiterate and that Japan is a third world country with no tecnical expertise.

    1. Re:Japan and technology by Chikungunya · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As in the case of Yusuke Katayama, Japanese law enforcement proved to be quite ignorant about technology crimes. After getting death threats on messages boards they managed to "get" confessions from several people that later were proved to be just victims of malware in their computers. It is normal to have doubts about their capacity to deal with cybercrime.

    2. Re:Japan and technology by causality · · Score: 2

      As in the case of Yusuke Katayama, Japanese law enforcement proved to be quite ignorant about technology crimes. After getting death threats on messages boards they managed to "get" confessions from several people that later were proved to be just victims of malware in their computers. It is normal to have doubts about their capacity to deal with cybercrime.

      That's not a problem with their capacity to deal with "cybercrime" (which is merely old-fashioned fraud, with a computer).

      That's a much more fundamental problem with their ability to coerce confessions. If you let any police force do that, just so they can maintain an illusion of competency and effectiveness, you will have these problems. It has worked out that way every single time it has been tried. Japanese police in particular are known for worrying about their appearance first, and the facts second, though this hardly makes them unique among cops.

      The US has its own version of this, but it's not implemented directly by the police. It's implemented by the prosecutors. Someone commits a crime, and you don't want to bother with all the time and effort of a proper trial. So you invent an excuse to charge them with something very much more serious, twisting legal language as much as necessary, to scare the hell out of them. Then from the "kindness" of your heart, you let them plead guilty to a far lesser charge that actually does represent the crime they committed. There it is -- you just coerced a confession. This takes much less time than fair trials do, allowing you to take on many more cases in a given timeframe, allowing you to look like a highly effective and desirable prosecutor to the masses of people who never look deeply into anything.

      Anytime this kind of intimidation is used on people whose guilt has not (yet?) been established, it will be abused.

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
    3. Re:Japan and technology by causality · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If I didn't use the word "enlightened", it was not an accidental omission. Effectively putting words in my mouth by adding connotations I was careful to omit, and then complaining about the presence of the connotations you just added, well, that really doesn't benefit anyone. It does, however, represent the general decline of Slashdot because far too many people are either doing that, or disclaiming claims that were never made in an attempt to prevent someone else from doing that. Look deeply at the situation and you will find within yourself a subconscious (you see and understand that word "subconscious", right?) need to display your cleverness and to appear "right" in the eyes of others, i.e. what is commonly called insecurity. It leads to all sorts of absurd behavior like this.

      The point (that you had to work to miss) was: in a supposedly representative republic that supposedly carries out the will of The People, extremely unpopular laws were impossible (and downright dangerous) to enforce. It's no coincidence the population at that time had far fewer opiates in the form of entertainment, sports, and becoming obese. Now contrast that with, for example, the modern ongoing prohibition of marijuana that most people do not support.

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
  3. research: tx malleability at MtGox unlikely by QuasiSteve · · Score: 2

    Unlikely to be the cause of the vast majority of the claimed 'lost' coins, that is.

    Bitcoin Transaction Malleability and MtGox
    http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6676

    In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves. This allows an attacker to mount a malleability attack in which it intercepts, modifies, and rebroadcasts a transaction, causing the transaction issuer to believe that the original transaction was not confirmed. In February 2014 MtGox, once the largest Bitcoin exchange, closed and filed for bankruptcy claiming that attackers used malleability attacks to drain its accounts. In this work we use traces of the Bitcoin network for over a year preceding the filing to show that, while the problem is real, there was no widespread use of malleability attacks before the closure of MtGox.

  4. Your stereotype is out of date by SteveFoerster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Stop stereotyping -- there are reasons to use Bitcoin other than just to be anti-establishment. It's an inexpensive and instantaneous way to transfer value internationally, for example.

    Besides, Bitcoin isn't untraceable. The blockchain means it's rather the opposite, and thus is much less suitable for crime or tax avoidance than its detractors say.

    --
    Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
    1. Re:Your stereotype is out of date by QilessQi · · Score: 3, Informative

      I find that most debunkers and detractors operate out of some kind of emotional offense

      Well, to be fair, most fans and defenders probably operate out of some kind of emotional defense. For example:

      I have no strong feelings about Bitcoin, for or against. Which is why I found it amusing that when I mentioned the transaction malleability issue in a recent discussion -- and subsequently quoted the 3rd party sources (Forbes and TechCrunch) which attributed Silk Road 2's problems to this issue -- one of Bitcoin's staunch defenders accused me of wearing a "tinfoil hat", which was odd because I was neither putting forth a conspiracy theory nor quoting a source which was. This individual said that I could either believe his facts or [what he asserted to be] non-facts from sources that I consider to be slightly more reliable than a random pseudoanonymous Slashdot user. Yes, "Appeal to Authority" may be a logical fallacy, but you can't counteract it simply by claiming to be more authoritative, all the while resorting to Argumentum ad Hominem.

      Has Bitcoin been demonized? Well, it has gotten bad press, because of various things. What it has been used to purchase. The problems with various exchanges. The perceived complexity of use compared to conventional fiat currency.

      Then there are the Bitcoin fellow-travelers, like the Winkelvoss twins and Bill Gates, who I think manage to turn a lot of Slashdot readers off Bitcoin simply by singing its praises. Sure, that's irrational too. If I found out that Steve Ballmer liked chocolate and kittens, I wouldn't immediately hate those things. True, I'd enjoy them a little less because of the uncomfortable association, and I wouldn't eat them in the same sandwich like he does, but still. Chocolate and kittens.

      Are non-Bitcoin adopters jealous of the ones who jumped on the mining bandwagon early? Maybe, in some cases, there's a fox-and-the-grapes issue at work. But mostly I think there's just a lot of eye-rolling at the picture of a bright, shiny, government-intervention-free financial future that some cryptocurrency advocates are hyping. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to understand what this is like on the receiving end.

      So let's allow for a little irrationality on both sides of the fence.

      --
      Koans and fables for the software engineer