Hackers Hit Mt. Gox Exchange's CEO, Claim To Publish Evidence Of Fraud.
forbes.com
forbes.com
There are plenty of things to distrust about Mt Gox, but this isn't evidence of anything other than a security vulnerability that allows their DB to be stolen. (which is a big problem on it's own when you're in finance, but Mt Gox is past the point where being hacked again will hurt their reputation in any meaningful way)
Incredibly unbelievable. It's not enough that they stole bitcoins from me. Their site made no mention of how I wouldn't be able to withdraw them for months without verification - it said "Your limit is 100BTC" and I was willing to take the risk of them holding my coins for a day or two so I could sell and buy back based on recent news. Only to find out by surprise that my risk extended for months while I was required to send them my private documents.
But also, like a slap in the face, instead of turning their servers off once they declared bankruptcy, they now they let the hacker world have access to photocopies of my driver's license, passport, home address, and gas bill?
I can't even begin to express the rage I have for this man and his lies and incompetence. I have never hated someone so much in my entire life.
Also, the people who leaked this database are unto more nefarious purposes, the DB dump contained a malware file, which if run searches for bitcoin wallets on the host computer. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/200k30/the_tibanneb...
That's just evil genius stuff right there.
Personally, I wouldn't give up my passport unless it was for the government or a government-certified service.
I wouldn't either, but Mt. Gox wouldn't send my bitcoins back without it, so I was forced to send it to them. And then they managed to lose my bitcoins and my documents.
I stopped when it got to the verification phase. It's one thing to lose a few bucks that I was willing to gamble, but it's another entirely to lose my personal details and a scan of my passport. I guess I dodged that bullet.
However, this is not evidence of fraud: The deposits and withdraws dump is missing data, some older transactions are not in it. The same older transactions appear differently in the from the export feature on the mtgox site: instead of deposit/withdraw those records show just "in" or "out". I assume those are records from some past version of the site software and are just stored in another table.
At the minimum Gox should be considered criminally negligent, but "publishing evidence of fraud" via hacking them isn't going to help bring legal action. I realise, of course, that this might not be the aim here. :)
Called it!