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Mt. Gox CEO Charged With Stealing $2.7 Million
An anonymous reader writes: After being arrested six weeks ago in Japan, Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles has now been formally charged with the theft of $2.66 million worth of clients' money. "Tokyo-based MtGox shuttered last year after admitting 850,000 coins — worth around $480 million at the time, or $387 million at current exchange rates — had disappeared from its digital vaults. The exchange, which once said it handled around 80 percent of global Bitcoin transactions, filed for bankruptcy protection soon after the cyber-money went missing, leaving a trail of angry investors calling for answers." Karpeles still denies doing anything illegal. The case is proving difficult for Japanese authorities to unravel, and they're taking it as slowly as they legally can.
Hard to have any sympathy for the situation. If you sign up for an currency that is designed to be outside of the world governments, don't come crying to the government that dumb ass idea blew up in your face.
In Japan there are at least two courts you go through, kind of like a grands jury in the States first. But if you're found guilty in the "grand jury" you're definitely going to be found guilty in the regular court.
Japan's criminal justice system is terrible, just terrible.
Crime is very low to start with so police are mostly helpful cop on the corner type or worst case dealing with drunks, gropers, or teen prostitution (but they usually don't bother with that one). There are a very few 'elites' who handle the nasty stuff, and they have an extremely high conviction rate because once they finger you you're going to jail whether you did it or not. Prosecution, defense, and judge all go with that (the detective said so!), so the only thing up for debate, really, is the sentence. There's a grand jury for a few things but they're mostly go along go along too.
And they know nothing at all about technology. There was a thing two (?) years ago where some mother's apartment dwelling otaku freak was cancelling Kurko's Basketball (a popular manga/anime) events left and right for over a year and they couldn't do a damn thing about it. Eventually the freak got so cocky he got careless and did things like using messenger cats. My memory's a little hazy, but it went on seemingly forever and the cops were completely helpless. And they're terrible with corporate crime like this (the handling of the Olympus affair was a disgrace) since usually it's all a matter of what Japanese politicians you have in your pocket - but apparently Mt. Gox didn't have any. Whoops.
I think Karpeles did it, or at least someone close to him at Mt. Gox did it, because it's just entirely too fishy, but I don't think this will prove it.