The Metropolitan Police Department arrested the president of a Tokyo-based company operating a transaction of virtual currency bitcoin on Saturday on suspicion of falsely operating the company’s online transaction system to transfer its clients’ cash and bitcoins to his own account, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
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No police statement could be obtained immediately on Saturday morning in Tokyo. His lawyer was not avaiulable for comment, the WSJ said. The official said authorities alleged that he had manipulated the balance of a company account and used it to counter orders from customers.
After Nikkei reported on Friday that he was going to be arrested, Karpeles told the Wall Street Journal that the allegations were “false” and he would “of course deny” them.
Karpeles has not been charged, as it is legal in Japan to detain a suspect for 23 days before doing so, Mochizuki says.
Mr. Karpelès was later said to have recovered about 200,000 bitcoins from another computer that was not connected to the others.
Mt Gox, which at one point hosted 80% of trades in the popular digital currency bitcoin, collapsed after reporting that 850,000 bitcoins were stolen in what it claims was the result of a two-year-long cyber-attack.
Before it collapsed, Mt. Gox was considered the Internet’s largest hub for trading bitcoin. He also has to deal with the many depositors of Mt. Gox who would like some or all of their money back.
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However, a new report released by the Japanese group WizSec in April 2015 showed that Mt. Gox actually started leaking BTC in 2011 and was “practically depleted of Bitcoins by 2013”.
