Topic: If you still trust MtGox read this story -- 700 EUR stolen! (Read 3967 times)

Mt. Gox customer service is correct, they don't hold the funds. He's just doing a poor job of explaining the issue. The OP erroneously told SatoshiDice to send funds to some random guy's Mt. Gox account and now he wants Mt. Gox to get him back the funds. Mt. Gox can't do that because Mt. Gox is a hard money system. Their customer service is doing a poor job of explaining that Bitcoin transfers are irreversible and if you send funds to someone, even if by mistake, you cannot get them back.

here we go again....

why can't you guys stop this..

it is not doing anything good...

MTGOX IS A SCAM. end of story anyone who says otherwiseis misguided.

Same thing happened to me at Mt. Gox with a different Plinko Pinball site. I sent in .1 BTC and won .2BTC.
support there is a joke. I'm a support manager and they couldn't understand (though I suspect they do).
They finally admitted that the sending address they assigned me was a "temporary address" that "someone else owns".

Mt Gox should give better warning not exclusive to Satoshi but specify that if you Withdraw fund to an address that a return reply of funds will go to someone else's account.

I use mt gox still with primedice but now will move to coinbase.

I think Bitcoin QT and Coinbase do (BQT should, and Coinbase had a FAQ where others said it worked fine). I'm thinking I read somewhere that Blockchain.info doesn't though.

What most people say to do is send the smallest amount possible as a test.

This was a tough lesson, I'm sorry it happened. To help me learn from this event (and simultaneously admit my lack of knowledge), will Bitcoin QT wallet addresses send and receive? How about online wallets like Blockchain.info or Coinbase.com)?

More specifically, it's the difference between hard money (cash or its equivalent) and soft money (promises to pay). Americans particularly are not used to dealing with hard money systems, other than cash, because American banking and consumer finance is pretty much all soft money. Gox is a hard money system. When you send Bitcoins to someone's Gox deposit address, it's supposed to be, semantically, as if you handed that person cash. This rule is needed because Bitcoins can very easily leave Gox as hard money and the only practical way to soften the money would be to add friction to this path.

I'm noticing a theme here...I suppose that's one way to spam a thread and boost your post count...

But back to the point of the thread:

I know this is just rehashing what others have said at this point, but I suppose it also bears repeating. Reversing a Bitcoin transaction (accidental or otherwise) isn't possible, unless you manage to get the receiving party to cooperate. If the funds you sent to SDice ended up going back to another user's account, then that would be mighty hard to retrieve. It may be worth it to keep up the fight with Gox, but I'd say let it go. I'm sure you'll know for next time, even though it was quite a pricey learning experience.

Adding to comment...

Unless they were never sent any of the funds in the first place... From the gambling site, who "knows", that mtgox is not an acceptable deposit. As far as you know, they just kept the funds, and said they sent them. Ask them for the address they sent the funds to. The proof should be there, in the block-chain.

Yea, it is not wise to use an "exchange" or "trader" as a "personal bank/wallet". They are there only to get money from you, and give it to you... not to your friends. If they failed to send it to you, or get it from you... then you could justify your complaint. However, YOU abused the system, and got burned.

There are warnings all over. Obviously you don't read the "I agree..." things you sign.

You made the choice to send it to an account that wasn't yours. You gambled, and lost. That is NOT their problem if the person you sent the money to, did not return it to YOUR account, with the correct method. Stop gambling... or do what is legally required for a dispute... "Get a police report, make a case, present the case with the evidence to a judge, and have it settled."

If you are in Germany, you should use a German exchange. Why risk using a foreign exchange? Did you plan on flying there to settle the dispute? Do you have "international lawyers" to settle your disputes? Then stop dealing with international crap! Hmmm, regulation and insured handlers are not looking so bad now, after all... are they...

It's a learning process.  And it's ok to make some mistakes along the way as long as you learn from them.  But nottm28 has a point--look at all of the members on this thread that had something useful to contribute (and ignore the others who still have newbie tags).  We are all basically saying the same thing but I think it's finally sinking into you that you cannot think of bitcoin in the same way that you think of other currencies.  It's something unlike anything else you have ever done.  But those of us with some experience are all saying basically the same thing because in this ecosystem that's how the rules are.  It'll take some time to get used to it, and there are definite advantages and disadvantages with bitcoin vs fiat currency, but this is why you are here in this forum trying to learn.  hopefully you have learned a lot today from this thread and from reading the other subforums and are on your way to becoming more proficient in BTC.

G'night mate!

I will not bring real banks into this anymore getting tired as well as it's 3 AM here, logging off now. It was good to talk!

Well said Frank - clearly a trusted member who knows his stuff...

And once again you are confounding the banking system with the bitcoin system.  While there are parallels  the two systems are inherently different.  As someone who is new to bitcoin, I understand your confusion, but remember that you are dealing in a different system with different rules here.

And it could be that they are logged somehow that the support team can't access or know how to access.  Similarly, if you were to call Bank of America or Chase up, and had an issue with your account, you can't just talk to the support people.  There are account research specialists whose sole job it is to research issues like these!  But once again, we are making assumptions about a system we know nothing (or close to nothing) about.

You would be surprised how this turns out when the responsible party is an actual bank http://www.calbankers.com/compliance-bulletin/bank-held-liable-wire-transfer-losses-phishing-scam
Of course MtGox is not one. If it were one, it would be required to either refund all of them, or put barriers in place

I think that's part of the reason there was so much confusion in the first place with the email thread you posted.  Like it's said below, someone who intentionally uses something that they know won't work isn't something that people are going to be thinking about and it'll require a lot of explanation!


Agreed.  If it were a large sum of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars), a reasonable person could be expected to question it, but for someone who deals in large volumes, which this other account user might be, a reasonable person may not bat an eye that their books are off by about 3 BTC (or whatever the transaction was for).

Correct, I am assuming that once the money is inside MtGox they log all the internal transaction with BTC addresses. I know they log them because I have account history. I assume they are associated with BTC txn data because I can't see it working otherwise.

I'm not sure who the "they" is here. If you mean Gox, I'm not sure how much effort it is fair to require of them to work around other people's assumptions that are known to be broken.

It is if you investigate it. I would analogize it to intentionally depositing money in the wrong bank account -- if some company keeps sending them money over and over addressed to the wrong account, at some point the bank has to draw the line. It's not fair to expect them to continue debiting the accounts of innocent customers incorrectly credited by someone else's mistake. It's not unreasonable for them to say that they'll credit the accounts the depositor asks them to credit rather than having to constantly tell innocent customers that their balance is wrong.

If it's in their MtGox account, there is no problem. If their balance is not sufficient for the account to remain solvent, it should still be put as a liability on their account.


If that were true, they should make it a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Like a real warning!
Although, I bet it is surprisingly easy to figure out what's where from that data (just a graph traversal).