
Mark Karpeles arrested in Japan for “inflating assets” - artursapek
http://www.wsj.com/articles/japanese-police-arrest-mark-karpeles-of-collapsed-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-1438393669
======
Zikes
Sucks to be him.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate)

~~~
Nadya
Japan also has a culture of guilty until proven innocent, which contributes to
why the conviction rate is so high.

~~~
rayiner
> Japan has a conviction rate that exceeds 99% (Note that it includes guilty
> plea cases.[1]), which has been attributed to low prosecutorial budgets
> impelling understaffed prosecutors to present judges with only the most
> obviously guilty defendants.[2]

I don't know if that's bad. Another way to look at the numbers: in Florida,
with a 59% conviction rate, almost half the cases brought by prosecutors are a
waste of everyone's time.

~~~
Nadya
It's a mixed bag of good and bad. It's good because as you mentioned - wastes
less money. It's bad because anyone brought forward is expected to be guilty
(even if innocent) because otherwise they would not have been prosecuted to
begin with, right?

If you're being prosecuted you're essentially assumed guilty in all but the
most rare cases.

With a 59% conviction rate - it means more people are being assumed innocent
until proven guilty, or that the evidence is too weak to prosecute on. If that
means innocent people don't get unfairly imprisoned - that's a good thing.

I'd rather see 10 guilty people walk free than one innocent unfairly
imprisoned.

~~~
cperciva
_With a 59% conviction rate - it means more people are being assumed innocent
until proven guilty, or that the evidence is too weak to prosecute on. If that
means innocent people don 't get unfairly imprisoned - that's a good thing._

If you can afford bail, a 59% conviction rate means that you're less likely to
be wrongfully imprisoned. But there are a lot of people who can't post bail
and end up spending months or years behind bars only to be found not guilty --
or even to have all the charges against them dropped.

------
DonHopkins
Did they finally arrest him for implementing SSH in PHP?

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100701145902/http://blog.magic...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100701145902/http://blog.magicaltux.net/2010/06/27/php-
can-do-anything-what-about-some-ssh/)

PHP can do anything, what about some ssh?

Last time I already tried to prove PHP can do anything when it comes to
network protocols by implementing a DNS server.

This time I’m doing it again with a server-side implementation of the SSH2
protocol.

You probably know SSH at least by its name. It’s a of secure telnet
replacement which also allows many other things such as port forwarding,
remote file management (with sftp) and more.

With PHP I could write a fully working SSH server in only 3 days. Of course I
didn’t implement every single extension there is to SSH, but I’ve implemented:
[...]

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100702090107/http://ookoo.org/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100702090107/http://ookoo.org/svn/pinetd2/trunk/code/classes/Daemon/SSHd/)

------
fru2013
An interesting read for those who may have not seen it yet: "The Willy
Report".[1] I would not be surprised at all if this was exactly what happened.

[1] [https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-
repor...](https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-
of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-
price-of-bitcoin/)

~~~
joeyspn
I was going to post this... In order to understand the two big bitcoin bubbles
you need to know all about "Willy the Bot"... Apparently Karpeles was
operating a fractional reserve since the first breach, and he expected to
return the btcs with time (selling high and buying low), but he was not able
and all fell apart. Willy looks like an internal tool...

------
austenallred
Also known as "stealing hundreds of millions of dollars"

------
brayton
This is interesting - "Mr. Karpelès hasn’t been formally charged. In Japan,
suspects can be detained for up to 23 days without a formal charge or the
possibility of bail."

~~~
sparkzilla
SOP. That's the time it takes them to get a 'confession'.

~~~
sparkzilla
To clarify: I personally know several people who have gone through the
Japanese legal system and this is exactly what happens. The idea is that the
suspect confesses and gets processed more easily. Remorse is a big thing in
Japan. That also explains the 97% conviction rate. The other side of this is
that there are far less arrests than you would expect, as the police and
prosecutors want to keep the conviction ratio as high as possible and don't
want to be distracted by the possibility that the accused may actually be
innocent.

------
aikah
Is it Mark or Marc ? I thought he was French. I wonder if he may have been
better off moving back to France, or some people may want to have a 'word'
with him here too.

[https://archive.is/S8SSb](https://archive.is/S8SSb) because paywall.

~~~
nomat
I am pretty sure it is Mark.

Also, you can google the title of the article in order to get past the
paywall. This works for the NYT as well.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Opening it in Incognito mode also works.

------
sparkzilla
For those catching up. I made this Mt Gox timeline: [http://newslines.org/mt-
gox/](http://newslines.org/mt-gox/)

~~~
sparkzilla
According to Bloomberg [1] the police say Karpeles accessed a Bitcoin trading
system on a U.S. server in February 2013 to record transfers totaling $1
million to an account he owned, although the amount may not have been actually
transferred.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-01/former-
mt-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-01/former-mt-gox-chief-
karpeles-arrested-japanese-police-say)

------
powera
Wait, I assumed he was already in jail. Why wasn't he already in jail?

~~~
rwmj
I think a more pertinent question is why the heck was he still hanging around
in Japan?

------
mikeknoop
There's a weird connection between Mark and an online game I used to play way
back in the day (late 90s).

[http://www.graalians.com/forums/showthread.php?p=456435#post...](http://www.graalians.com/forums/showthread.php?p=456435#post456435)

[https://www.google.com/?q=Mark+Karpeles+graal+online](https://www.google.com/?q=Mark+Karpeles+graal+online)

The game is still online: [http://graalonline.com/](http://graalonline.com/)

------
PhasmaFelis
Who would have thought that the Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange was not a
reliable place to keep your money?

~~~
jrockway
If you had posted this during peak San Francisco work hours, you would have
gotten 86 replies saying how "mtgox is not an acronym for anything, it's
people like you who are ruining the world."

This, I think, is the "it's GNU/Linux, not Linux" for a new generation of
pedants.

~~~
to3m
What's actually happening is what should happen - people go quiet and look at
the walls, or out of the window, or check their watch, or overly carefully
clear their throat, and shuffle their feet slightly, embarrassed that
somebody's actually come out with this clichéd lead balloon without having
realised beforehand that it will simply fall flat and make them look a bit of
a dick. But maybe if it's ignored for long enough, everybody can pretend it
just didn't happen, or, failing that, the ground will open up and consume
everybody that witnessed it, much to their shared relief.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Nah, you've got the reason wrong. I've been making the joke for a while, as
you say, and the reaction used to be exactly what jrockway said: a bunch of
people being consumed with righteous rage that I could slander such an
upstanding institution.

These days, they just awkwardly shuffle their feet and don't say anything,
because it turns out we were _totally right_ about the wisdom of trusting your
money to the Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange.

------
Kenji
If you want to inflate assets, you need to be a state-approved bank, then you
can do the exact same thing unpunished (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-
reserve_banking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking) ).
That's an important lesson to learn.

~~~
serve_yay
Yeah, and you can't arrest, try and convict people either. Or ratify treaties.

------
jboggan
I'm really glad I didn't get investment from him.

