Has justice arrived in the Mt. Gox case? Perhaps that’s the scenario as after nearly ten years, two Russian men have been charged with conspiring to steal more than 600,000 bitcoin units.
Is the Mt. Gox Case Coming to an End?
The federal government has laid charges out against Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner. They’re accused of conspiring to launder as much as 647,000 BTC funds stolen from the exchange. At the time of the theft, these units would have been worth around $400 million, a figure that would be up tenfold today.
Also, Bilychenko is charged separately for trying to launder the money through BTC-e – a fraudulent exchange – run by Alexander Vinnik, a notorious Russian crypto criminal that was recently extradited to the U.S. for financial crimes. Assistant attorney general Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. commented in a recent statement:
As alleged in the indictments, starting in 2011, Bilyuchenko and Verner stole a massive amount of cryptocurrency from Mt. Gox, contributing to the exchange’s ultimate insolvency. Armed with the ill-gotten gains from Mt. Gox, Bilyuchenko allegedly went on to help set up the notorious BTC-e virtual currency exchange, which laundered funds for cyber criminals worldwide.
If the end of the Mt. Gox debacle is finally and truly coming to an end, then congratulations to those at the top of the justice ladder… It only took them nine years to get things in order. Mt. Gox was one of the first major bitcoin exchange hacks to occur in the industry. Happening in February of 2014, the exchange saw more than $400 million (the sum listed above) vanish into thin air from one night to the next.
For years, it was assumed that the CEO of the exchange Mark Karpeles was guilty of having something to do with the money’s disappearance, and he was close to spending time in a Japanese jail after he was arrested for crimes relating to the platform’s end. However, this situation takes things in a whole new direction, and it’s hard to know who’s truly at fault.
The circumstances surrounding Mt. Gox have always been mysterious. They have also led to a string of related crimes over the years to the point that it’s now no longer the largest crypto theft to have ever occurred… Not by a long shot.
Hacks Keeps Happening
An even bigger “mishap” took place roughly four years later in early 2018. Also occurring in Japan (where Mt. Gox was situated), the victim this time around was crypto exchange Coincheck, and the platform wound up losing more than half a billion in assorted crypto funds.
The cycle has only continued since then, and many crypto exchanges over the years have worked hard to implement know your customer (KYC) tactics to ensure that their clients (and their reserves) remain safe.