The former head of defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, Mark Karpeles, pictured, has reportedly been arrested in connection with the disappearance of virtual currency worth hundreds of millions of US dollars.
French-born Karpeles, 30, is suspected of falsifying data on the outstanding balance of the exchange.
At one point Mt. Gox was the world’s largest hub for trading the digital currency. But it filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after claiming 750,000 customer bitcoins and another 100,000 belonging to the exchange had been stolen, supposedly due to a software security flaw.
The “lost” funds were said to be worth US$480 million at the time of the bankruptcy filing. Mt. Gox also said more than $27 million had gone “missing” from its Japanese bank accounts.
Karpeles at the time blamed hackers for the loss, but later said he had recovered 200,000 of the lost bitcoins.
