Not to mention that it's probably the biggest theft in recent recorded history! Half a billion dollars!
The main reason that the Tokyo cops didn't get involved earlier was that
nobody was filing complaints. Remember all those shills telling users to be patient with Gox's delays in payment? (Reread
"Mt Gox Withdrawal Delays starting from last April.) It looks like nobody sued Gox or reported them to any regulatory agency before the bankruptcy.
We're seeing action now. Gox asked for "civil rehabilitation", which usually takes about two weeks to get and would leave Karpeles in charge with payments stalled. But the Tokyo court didn't fall for that. They send in a supervisor to check up on Gox. After six weeks, the supervisor reports back to the court, and the court fires Karpeles and calls in the cops to investigate.
With Karpeles fired, the remaining employees now report to the provisional administrator, and soon to the court-appointed trustee. They will be telling the investigators all the dirt on Karpeles and Mt. Gox to avoid being prosecuted themselves. The administrator is bringing in outside technical experts and auditors. The cash and Bitcoins went somewhere. With full access to bank records and Mt. Gox records, they'll soon know where.
Reuters has been digging up more info. They just
interviewed Karpeles' mommy. Quotes:
"He didn't go to university. He failed badly in his second-last year of high school and decided to quit. I told him that if he was going to do that he should become a plumber, so he got an electrician's diploma. Then one day, I saw him walking around with a huge book, called "PHP". He told me he had become a doctor in PHP," a computer programming language.
...
"(Mark's) communication at a personal level is catastrophic. It's always been difficult to get him to speak. We tried to get him to be more extrovert ... Sometimes I wonder whether it's not some kind of trauma linked to my mother. I had the same problem when I was younger."
...
"I don't understand (the fraud accusations). I would never say it's unthinkable, but Mark is my son, and my job as a mother is to do what I can for my son. That said, if genuinely there was dishonesty, I will not cover for him."
...
Asked about Karpeles' own admission in a 2006 blog post that he had two computer fraud-related convictions before he was 21, she said: "No, no, I don't think there was ever any conviction. I don't know. There are maybe things he hid from me."
