How does the DB dump show fraud? I can see the DB shows they have half a million bitcoins, but if Gox's claims are true then the problem is the DB doesn't match reality; their DB will show they have coins but their wallet is empty.
There are plenty of things to distrust about Mt Gox, but this isn't evidence of anything other than a security vulnerability that allows their DB to be stolen. (which is a big problem on it's own when you're in finance, but Mt Gox is past the point where being hacked again will hurt their reputation in any meaningful way)
> "a user on the BitcoinTalk forum posted a message–since deleted by the forum’s moderators–claiming to be offering for sale a 20 gigabyte stolen database from Mt. Gox, including the personal details of all its users and even scans of their passports."
Incredibly unbelievable. It's not enough that they stole bitcoins from me. Their site made no mention of how I wouldn't be able to withdraw them for months without verification - it said "Your limit is 100BTC" and I was willing to take the risk of them holding my coins for a day or two so I could sell and buy back based on recent news. Only to find out by surprise that my risk extended for months while I was required to send them my private documents.
But also, like a slap in the face, instead of turning their servers off once they declared bankruptcy, they now they let the hacker world have access to photocopies of my driver's license, passport, home address, and gas bill?
I can't even begin to express the rage I have for this man and his lies and incompetence. I have never hated someone so much in my entire life.
I feel for you. My cousin has also lost his money and driver's license copy. Incredible amount of incompetence. He said that it is ironic that he is saying he has lost money rather than bitcoins.
Also, the people who leaked this database are unto more nefarious purposes, the DB dump contained a malware file, which if run searches for bitcoin wallets on the host computer
> I wouldn't give up my passport unless it was for the government or a government-certified service.
I wouldn't either, but Mt. Gox wouldn't send my bitcoins back without it, so I was forced to send it to them. And then they managed to lose my bitcoins and my documents.
A few weeks ago when BTC was trading at a huge discount on Mt Gox, I thought "what the hell" and started the process of signing up to experiment with buying a trivial amount as a lark. I'm usually skeptical (and eventually correct) about things that look like speculative bubbles, but at least there could be a story to tell.
I stopped when it got to the verification phase. It's one thing to lose a few bucks that I was willing to gamble, but it's another entirely to lose my personal details and a scan of my passport. I guess I dodged that bullet.
The "evidence of fraud" is that the sum of all bitcoin deposits minus the sum of withdraws is some 500k number, while the sum of balances is some 900k number.
However, this is not evidence of fraud: The deposits and withdraws dump is missing data, some older transactions are not in it. The same older transactions appear differently in the from the export feature on the mtgox site: instead of deposit/withdraw those records show just "in" or "out". I assume those are records from some past version of the site software and are just stored in another table.
A moot point by now, but publicly declaring a hack is a pretty good way of making it harder to actually prove fraud. Any potential defence will go along the lines of "hackers with malicious intent could have planted this evidence".
At the minimum Gox should be considered criminally negligent, but "publishing evidence of fraud" via hacking them isn't going to help bring legal action. I realise, of course, that this might not be the aim here. :)
There are plenty of things to distrust about Mt Gox, but this isn't evidence of anything other than a security vulnerability that allows their DB to be stolen. (which is a big problem on it's own when you're in finance, but Mt Gox is past the point where being hacked again will hurt their reputation in any meaningful way)