By
Godfrey Benjamin
December 27th, 2023
Mt. Gox lost millions of bitcoins in February, but hackers claim it still has some customer resources.
Tokyo Bitcoin exchanger Mt. Gox lost $400 million worth of bitcoins last March with its managing bodies claiming that this was a durect consequence of hackers’s transaction bug to divert the funds, However, Mt. Gox’s customers say they are not so sure in it, suggesting instead that the exchange’s owners pocketed the cash.
Now, facing silence regarding the fate of the money and the methods by which 6 percent of all of the Bitcoin in the world could have been stolen, a group of hackers revealed that it had intruded into the bankrupted Bitcoin exchange’s network to get answers.
The hackers gained access to the personal blog and Reddit account of Mark Karpeles, Mt. Gox’s CEO, and later used the platforms to
post a message proving Karpeles access to some of the bitcoins that he’d reported stolen.
The group uploaded online a series of files that included a spreadsheet of more than a million trades, Karpeles’ home addresses, and a screenshot purportedly confirming the hackers’ access to the data, reports The Verge.
Which is more, the obtained data included a file that constains the exchange’s balances in 18 currencies. The hackers point to this file as evidence that Mt. Gox hides the real current situation.
Recent reports claim that the veracity of the given file has yet to be confirmed as it could “simply highlight the kind of poor accounting practices that allowed hackers to steal the money in the first place, showing money in Mt. Gox’s balances that has long since made its way to hacker hands; or it could be evidence to support the theory that the company used the cover of a transaction exploit to steal its customers’ money.”
The Janese exchange previously announced that it had lost 750,000 of its customers’ bitcoins in its bankruptcy protection filing — as well as 100,000 of its own bitcoins — however, users are yet to see that money appear on the log of public Bitcoin transactions known as the blockchain. That means that current owner of lost money hasn’t used them yet.
Meanwhile, Forbes suggests the hack may be related another story: “In a possibly related incident, a user on the BitcoinTalk forum posted a message–since deleted by the forum’s moderators–claiming to be offering for sale a 20 gigabyte stolen database from Mt. Gox, including the personal details of all its users and even scans of their passports.”
“This document will never be elsewhere published by us,” wrote the user, who went by the name nanashi____. “Selling it one or two times to make up personal loses from gox closure.” The hacker asked for a price of 100 bitcoins for the database, about $63,600 at current exchange rates. ‘
By the way, the Bitcoin subforum on Reddit soon deleted the hackers’ post , stating that posting stolen content violated the forum’s etiquette rules.
However, users didn’t hesitate to draw their own conclusions: the top post on the forum Sunday afternoon read “Mt. Gox scam was just exposed — MK [Mark Karpeles] officially stole our funds.”