Mt Gox LEAKED Bitcoin for years before heist, says WizSec WizSec, a Tokyo-based group that's been investigating the Bitcoin thefts that eventually led to the unravelling of Mt Gox, reckons the crypto-currency was going missing from the trading firm long before it collapsed. The group's analysis suggests that the pilfering goes back as far as 2011, leading to a shortfall when Mt Gox …
As Max Merritt & The Meteors sang:
-----------------------------------------------------
Baby, I've been watching you
Watching everything you do
And I just can't help feeling
Someone else is stealing
You away from me
---
I see it written in your eyes
And you confirm it with your lies
Though the whip you weave can hold me
I would rather that you told me
Where you want to be
---
Oooh! slipping away from me
Oooh! slipping away from me
And it's breaking me in two
Watching you slipping away
This has all been most amusing to historians of money and banking. The past 5 years seem to have had compressed into them any and every monetary and banking scam that the human race has ever managed to invent.
A decent history of John Law or perhaps the state licensed banks of the American West would provide an excellent guide to what's happening in e-currencies.
The transactions are recorded forever but it is usually not clear who controls the addresses.
The investigator thinks that some of the addresses are linked to the btc-e exchange but only the exchange themselves will know for sure when they check their records. There is also every chance that bitcoins could have been sold and moved off exchange to someone thinking they are buying legitimately obtained bitcoin so even if a transaction trace does end up at an exchange account which can be tied to an actual person (all exchanges comply with KYC checks these days) then it doesn't automatically follow that this person is the hacker. They may however be able to provide investigators with the details of who they bought the bitcoin from.
So this sort of this is traceable but with ALLOT of detective work and only with the co-operation of all concerned. Even so some services exist solely to muddy the trail and are unlikely to cooperate.
Still more traceable than cash.
The discrepancy starts showing up around August 2011. Mt Gox was hacked in June 2011. They rolled back transactions after the hack, but I don't see much talk about strengthening security; my guess is that the hacker still had or quickly regained access, and decided to loot the place more slowly, avoiding the big selloffs that attracted attention the first time.
So a bit like finding a dodgy ATM which pays twice and debits your account once.
You just keep withdrawing money then paying it back in.
The bank thinks it is increasing its deposits when the opposite is happening.
Although paying it back into MtGox seems a bit dumb when you hit the point where it is virtually empty.
One thing - at some point they must have counted their BC and found the discrepancy.
Wonder when?
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