A hack on the blog owned by Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles calls into questions some of the claims the company made in its bankruptcy announcement. Hackers uploaded a data dump which they claim shows customer data with real account balances. According to TechCrunch, users of the bitcoin site say the information is accurate because they have located their own balances on the data sheet.
Mt. Gox stated it lost 850,000 bitcoin
Perhaps the most interesting piece of information on that data dump is where it shows that Mt. Gox had a balance of more than 951,000 bitcoins. That’s significantly more than the 850,000 bitcoins the company said it had stolen. Of course this doesn’t mean that Mt. Gox lied or even miscalculated the number of bitcoins it had. However, there are enough users who claim their balances are on the data dump to suggest that there is a chance that something fishy is going on here.
Along with the data dump, the hacker also posted a mirror page, which provides a clue about the identity of the hacker. It states, “I hated working with you. You deserve everything you get for what you did.” That note also suggests that there’s something more going on than what Mt. Gox has told the public.
Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy in U.S.
Mt. Gox has now filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. as well as Japan. The bitcoin exchange operator filed in Japan last month—an inevitable end to a weeks-long shutdown of the company’s site. The company claims hackers stole its bitcoins and that it will be unable to pay back what was stolen. Mt. Gox’s U.S. filing will temporarily stop U.S. legal action against it. Already a lawsuit seeking class action status has been filed against the bitcoin exchange. The lead plaintiff in that suit wants a judge to freeze the company’s U.S.-based servers and equipment and create a trust over the company’s assets.
