by John Smith 
Mark Karpeles, former CEO of Mt. Gox, sentenced to a suspended prison sentence!
Mark Karpeles, the former CEO of Mt. Gox, the former cryptocurrency exchange, was given a suspended prison sentence for falsifying his financial records.
This was announced by Bloomberg on Friday, March 15, 2019.
The Japanese court has found Karpeles guilty of falsifying the financial records by mingling his personal finances with those of the exchange in order to hide the losses of his platform from hackers.
However, he probably avoids a jail sentence after being sentenced to a suspended two-and-a-half-year sentence that he will not have to serve unless he commits another offense in four years.
The court of Japan noted in its verdict:
“The charge of handling electronic documents is true and deserves punishment, but there is no criminal evidence of embezzlement.”
At the time of mentioning the conditional prison, the court blamed Karpeles for causing “considerable damage to the trust of its users”.
To which the court added:
“There is no excuse for the defendant, who is an engineer with deep knowledge, to abuse his status and authority to perform intelligent tasks, criminal acts.”
Since the beginning of the trial, Karpeles has denied participating in the disappearance of the platform’s Bitcoins and apologized for the situation.
In fact, he stated that he cooperated with the Japanese police, but that he stopped after noticing that they suspected that he had stolen the funds.
However, despite denying responsibility, he was arrested for falsifying the records, but was released on bail a year later.
Karpeles, known at a time as the Bitcoin Baron, bought Mt. Gox in 2011 and made it one of the largest digital asset exchanges.
However, its downfall marked a milestone in the history of cryptocurrencies, generating deep distrust of investors for crypto trading platforms.
Indeed, beyond the falsifications that Karpeles made on the internal documents of Mt. Gox, doubts always hang over the reality of the piracy of the Mt. Gox platform.
That he may be related to this so-called hacking that has lost thousands or millions of Dollars today to the thousands of people who had an account at Mt. Gox!
Mt Gox, a cryptocurrency exchange in Japan, was the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, processing more than 70% of all Bitcoin transactions in the world.
A bit of what Binance is today.
In February 2014, Mt Gox went bankrupt following its piracy.
Victim of piracy, the world’s leading crypto exchange lost around 740,000 Bitcoins (6% of all existing Bitcoins at the time), valued at the equivalent of 500 million Dollarss at the time. And more than 14 billion Dollars at Bitcoin ATH…
$27 million were also missing in the bank accounts of the company.
Although 200,000 Bitcoins were eventually recovered, the remaining 650,000 have disappeared.
The pirate may be the Russian who held the exchange called BTC-e shut down by the FBI a few years ago and whose owner must be judged precisely.
Mark Karpeles is pretty lucky given the unclear aspects of this story and the many people who may have lost all their savings.
Especially when you know today the value of Bitcoin compared to 2014 or its ATH of 20 000 Dollars…
Hopefully, some will still recover some funds with this trial that has lasted for 5 years and whose remaining funds are blocked.
The moral of the story being to try, when it is possible, not to leave tokens on an exchange because it can be hacked or an inside exit scam is always possible because it seems that in many cases of hacking, inside help would not be excluded when it’s not just pure negligence or total incompetence of course!
Store your coins and your Bitcoins on a secure external wallet like the Ledger Nano X.
