Mark Karpeles, the former chief executive officer of now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, faces ten years in jail over alleged embezzlement, Japanese media report on Wednesday, December 12.<\/p>\n
According to a report from Nikkei<\/a>, prosecutors claimed at the Tokyo District Court that Karpeles used customers\u2019 funds for his own personal use.<\/p>\n According to the indictment, Karpeles embezzled a total of 341 million yen ($3 million) of customers’ money kept in a Mt. Gox bank account by transferring it to his own account between September and December of 2013. He also allegedly manipulated data on his company’s trading system to pad the balance.<\/p>\n Reportedly, Karpeles “diverted company funds to such uses as investing in a software development business for personal interest” and “played a great role in totally destroying the confidence of bitcoin users.”<\/p>\n Karpeles pleaded innocent in the first hearing of his trial in July 2017, saying, “I swear to God I am not guilty.”<\/p>\n Later in April of this year, the Frenchman apologized for the company\u2019s bankruptcy, stating:<\/p>\n \u201cI never imagined things would end this way and I am forever sorry for everything that\u2019s taken place and all the effect it had on everyone involved.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Mt. Gox officially filed for liquidation in April 2014 after claiming to have been hacked for 850,000 BTC, some of which was later found.<\/p>\n The case has been ongoing since then. In July 2018, creditors had a victory when the court issued an order approving a petition to begin civil rehabilitation. Next month, an online claim filing system was opened<\/a> allowing Mt.Gox\u2019s creditors to begin registering claims on the lost funds.<\/p>\n Last month, the trustee of Mt. Gox, Nobuaki Kobayashi, was seeking to extend the deadline for filing civil rehabilitation claims to December from the earlier deadline of October.<\/p>\n Follow ForkLog on Twitter<\/a><\/span> and Facebook<\/a><\/span>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mark Karpeles, the former chief executive officer of now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, faces ten years in jail over alleged embezzlement, Japanese media report on Wednesday, December 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"1","news_style_id":"","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"human_written","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[928,136],"class_list":["post-6310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-mark-karpeles","tag-mtgox"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"201","promo_type":"1","layout_type":"","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6310"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6314,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6310\/revisions\/6314"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}