As Mt. Gox remains silent on how it will address concerns of bitcoin owners after it declared bankruptcy, hackers have attacked the blog and Reddit account of bitcoin CEO Mark Karpeles and have accused him that the bitcoin exchange committed fraud.
On Sunday, Karpeles' "Magical Tux in Japan- Geekness brought me to Japan!" blog was hacked with the perpetrators posting the Mt. Gox files they have stolen. While the blog has been taken down, the revelation has spread across the Internet.
The hackers posted a 716-MB file that includes a spreadsheet detailing roughly a million bitcoin trades, an administration tool, and the curriculum vitae and home address of Karpeles. The hackers have implied that the top executive of the fallen Mt. Gox has lied. The evidence they have gathered shows that the cryptocurrency exchange still has 951,116 bitcoins in its possession.
The hackers, who allegedly have obtained the files from Mt. Gox, cry foul and made it clear on a note that came with the file. The posted files did not show personal details of account holders.
"That fat fuck has been lying!!" the note read. "We've been goxed!"
When Karpeles spoke to media upon declaring bankruptcy, he disclosed that Mt. Gox lost 850,000 -- a big 100,000 difference.
The Magicaltux is the identity often used by Karpeles when commenting on different corners of the Web. He named his blog, which was taken down after the hack, after it and Karpeles has not commented about the issue. Moderators of the subReddit deleted the post of the hackers due to violation of terms.
The once front-runner bitcoin trade space Mt. Gox declared bankruptcy at the end of February and disclosed $470 million-worth of bitcoin were stolen from its coffers. With the virtual money being an unregulated currency, authorities in Japan, where the company is based, and United States are perplexed on how they can help the victims.
Of course it is not certain yet if the accusations of the hackers are true and if the evidences presented hold water. The Forbes report cautioned everyone that it might also be a case of bad bookkeeping and that Mt. Gox could still be an unknowing victim.
With the noise generated by the hack, Mt. Gox has updated its site, posting a letter warning consumers of possible phishing attempts.
"It has come to our attention that Spam/Phishing emails looking as if MtGox was the sender are being sent to our users. These emails have not been sent by us and should be phishing emails," the letter read.
A certain "nanashi___" user of Bitcointalk.org posted that he or she is in possession of around 20GB of stolen data from Mt. Gox.
"I am selling all data obtained in recently MT. Gox database hack. File is ~20gb and contains full personal information of all clients in gox system, including passport scan. This document will never be elsewhere published by us. Selling it one or two times to make up personal loses from gox closure. Asking 100BTC for entire document. Willing to sell it in pieces, 10BTC for 2gb of data," the user wrote. The post has been deleted but its cached copy can be accessed.
As of reporting, the veracity of the stolen file and claims have not been confirmed.
