One of the strangest stories in crypto still isn’t over.
Mt. Gox was once Bitcoin’s biggest exchange. Then, in 2014, the exchange shut down its website and announced that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of customers’ Bitcoins had been lost to a series of hackings that went unnoticed over several years.
CEO Mark Karpeles was arrested by Japanese authorities in 2015 on charges of embezzlement and aggravated breach of trust but was eventually acquitted on most of the charges he faced and handed a suspended sentence for falsifying data. Authorities have since unveiled charges against others in connection to thefts of Bitcoin from Mt. Gox.
As for the investors who lost their crypto in the collapse, a massive jump in the price of Bitcoin in the years since Mt. Gox shut down has made it possible for them to get at least some of their original investments back. A website set up for the repayment process says, “Base Repayment, Intermediate Repayment and Early Lump-Sum Repayment are currently scheduled to be made by October 31, 2023, but the specific timing of repayment to each rehabilitation creditor has not been determined yet.”