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So Mt. Gox has defrauded its users of half a BILLION dollars in value. And, they've put out enough misinformation that those users believe "it wuz a hax0r that
by jellicle 13y ago
So Mt. Gox has defrauded its users of half a BILLION dollars in value.
And, they've put out enough misinformation that those users believe "it wuz a hax0r that did it". So no cops, no jail sentences.
I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed.
If you've been following this closely and you aren't writing the book already, you're missing out.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- omni 13y ago> I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. Not even close. Madoff's fraud was in the tens of billions.
- jotux 13y ago>I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. Madoff was estimated at ~$65b, the Enron settlement was $7.1b, Lehmen folded with $600b in assets, Comp-u-card overstated income and costed investors $14b, etc. etc.
- joeblau 13y agoExactly. This is just warmup exercise compared to the pros.
- ProAm 13y agoWe'll do better next time.
- abvdasker 13y agoAccording to Wikipedia, that 65b figure is inflated. It's more likely the total amount was somewhere between 10 and 20 billion[1]. That's obviously still a ton of money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff
- jellicle 13y agoSorry. I know the magnitude of Madoff's scam. I accidentally a word or two. What I wanted to write was something like, this would be the largest successful fraud (=no one goes to jail). Mt. Gox seems to have convinced everyone that "a hacker" took all the money, and now the insiders can retire to a non-extraditing country somewhere.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> What I wanted to write was something like, this would be the largest successful fraud (=no one goes to jail). Why would no one go to jail?
- bpicolo 13y agoUnregulated industry.
- dragonwriter 13y agoThere is pretty much no place on the planet where any "industry" is so unregulated that depriving people of their property without consent, or by false pretenses, without special legal privilege, is not illegal. The applicable laws aren't industry-specific regulations.
- jmpeax 13y agoYou're forgetting the 3 trillion the US government stole from its citizens and gave to the banks.
- baddox 13y agoWasn't that 9 trillion?
- nerfhammer 13y agoAnd then paid it back with interest
- pessimizer 13y agoBut not market rate interest, which was about infinity for the banks that accepted loans, because they were completely insolvent. And do we get to include the spread between the actual worth of all of those shit bonds we have been purchasing from them and the par prices we have been paying?
- djur 13y agoTARP was only about 250 billion and it's been repaid with interest. It was neither stolen nor given. If you're including various stabilization programs the Fed put into place, that money was neither stolen nor given either. It was created using sovereign authority that is granted to the Federal Reserve by law. The citizens of the US would be immensely poorer today if the world financial system had collapsed into a second Great Depression.
- hindsightbias 13y agoEconomics is supposed to be a morality play. Except when it comes to Bitcoin.
- frizzo 13y agoOooh, SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY GRANTED BY LAW. That definitely makes the rape of the middle class to bailout Goldman Sachs legit.
- 13y ago
- icebraining 13y agoPlease. That's not even the biggest fraud in my country (Portugal). In 1925 we had a group who printed 1% of our PIB in fake notes. Just in the 21th century, the state spent 12 billion dollars to bail out the creditors of a bank that was essentially a fraud machine. Mt.Gox is peanuts.