Ex-Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles Found Guilty Of Record Tampering By Japanese Court

The former CEO of the currently defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox, Mark Karpeles, has received a suspended jail sentence from the Tokyo District Court after being found guilty of financial records tampering. Today’s crypto news comes after Bloomberg reported an update on the case.

The Tokyo District Court found Karpeles guilty of involving his personal finances with the finances of the exchange in order to try and cover the losses of the platform due to the massive hack attack. He also received two more years in jail but he won’t have to serve this sentence unless he commits another offense in the next four years. The court stated that:

 “The charge of electronic record tampering is true and deserves punishment, but there’s no criminal evidence of embezzlement.”

As previously reported, back in 2011 Mt.Gox was hacked which led to the loss of more than 850,000 bitcoins that were then valued at $460 million which would be about $3.3 billion today. With the hack attack, about 24,000 creditors lost their funds which also led to the collapse of the exchange later in 2014.

The embezzlement and fraud were not connected directly to the theft, but, Karpeles’ behavior prior to the hack attack has raised some suspicion. In 2015 when he was initially charged, he allegedly found 200,000 of the missing BTC in cold storage.  According to Bloomberg’s citations, the court state that they would ‘’not look lightly upon the criminal responsibility of the defendant’’ and Karpeles was accused of causing harm to the trust of his users and creditors:

“There is no excuse for the defendant, who is an engineer with expert knowledge, to abuse his status and authority to perform clever criminal acts.”

After the trail in July 2017, Karpeles continued to plead not guilty and accused the Japanese court system and justice system allegedly having a 99 percent conviction rate of unfair treatment. He also claimed that he was interrogated for months and he had no legal representation but also that he was forced to sign a confession.

Also, at the start of this Month, the United States denied Karpeles’ motion to stay a separate lawsuit. He also dismissed the statements of Brock Pierce who claimed he can reboot the defunct trading platforms and to help creditors get their money back.