14 DAY TRIAL // Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy several weeks ago, announcing that it had lost over 850,000 Bitcoins, out of which 750,000 belonged to the platform’s users. This week, the company managed to find some misplaced 200,000 Bitcoins, which everyone finds suspicious.
Chris Dore, partner at Edelson law firm who represents the United States class action against the company, is one of those who doesn’t really buys Mt. Gox’s story.
“Their statement that they found these bitcoins in a random wallet and failed to tell anyone for two weeks is highly suspect,” he told CoinDesk.
Dore is referring to the fact that Mt. Gox’s statement suggests the coins were discovered on March 7, reported to the lawyers on March 8, who later informed the authorities on March 10. The announcement was made on the 21st, quite a big time gap.
Furthermore, Dore’s firm was already working on an investigation that involved some 180,000 bitcoins that were said to have been moving through the blockchain around the time of the discovery.
“We believe we were on the right trail. It appeared that these 180,000 – 200,000 bitcoins were being tumbled, that they were being broken down and reconstituted, so our goal was to find this out,” Dore said.
Prior to announcing that it was filing for bankruptcy, Mt. Gox had a lot of issues. First, the company blocked off Bitcoin withdrawals, claiming that a bug was causing issues on the platform. In order to get everything fixed, they had to block part of the network until everything was figured out.
Two weeks later and things weren’t running any better. In fact, all transactions had been halted during an entire day for further investigations.
Mark Karpeles then announced his decision to resign from the Bitcoin Foundation during the last weekend of February. The very next Monday, the site went down completely only to have the company explain that transactions were paused for the moment as an issue is being investigated.
An internal Mt. Gox document made its way to the media. In it, they were discussing how best to announce the company’s bankruptcy and the fact that they had lost over 744,000 of users’ Bitcoins.
While Mt. Gox didn’t immediately confirm the issue, saying instead that the problems continued to be dealt with, by the end of the week the bankruptcy documents had been filed, leaving countless users without access to their money.