It’s been about 10 months since Japanese bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was shut down after the company “lost” more than 850,000 of its customers bitcoin. The company initially blamed hackers or a bug in the blockchain for this loss, but investigations from the Tokyo Police seem to suggest that the majority of the “lost” bitcoins may have actually been stolen from within the company.
Nearly all of the roughly US$370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by hackers, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe. Of the 650,000 bitcoins unaccounted for—worth about US$208 million today—only about 7,000 appear to have been purloined by hackers, the newspaper reported on New Year’s Day, adding that investigators have yet to identify who was responsible. That conflicts with the explanation by Mt. Gox, which blamed a bug in the Bitcoin system when it filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 28.
