Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto candidate and chief scientist at NChain, has addressed the recent allegations about him hacking the now-defunct exchange Mt. Gox. Last week, a lead maintainer of Monero (XMR) privacy coin Ricardo Spagni tweeted out court documents suggesting Craig Wright’s affiliation with a Mt. Gox-related Bitcoin (BTC) wallet known as “1Feex”: “Just so we’re clear, Craig Wright has just openly admitted (via his lawyers) to be the guy that stole 80k BTC from Mtgox.” Spagni’s tweet followed a string of letters sent by Wright’s lawyers on June 12, where they stressed that their client owns 80 …

An IT specialist was jailed for 20 months at Liverpool Crown Court on June 11, after stealing cryptocurrency worth over £30,000 ($38,000). According to the St Helens Star, self-employed contractor Mark Andrews of St. Helens had been hired to fix a company’s computer systems last year, when he found and stole digital assets belonging to the company owner. IT contractor given the "keys to the kingdom" The victim had previously bought a quantity of cryptocurrency which he had stored in a private folder on his business network. By April 2019 the value of this had risen to £31,244 ($40,000). He …

A Japanese judge ruled in support of data tampering charges moved against Mark Karpeles — the CEO of now-defunct crypto exchange, Mt. Gox. At the end of March, Karpeles appealed his conviction on charges of having tampered with financial record data to harm his clients. Now, local news outlet Nikkei reported on June 11 that Tokyo District Court Judge Mariko Goto decided to uphold the previous ruling. Karpeles sentenced to over 2 years in jail The previous ruling sentenced Karpeles to two and a half years in jail for tampering with Mt. Gox data for February-September 2013 and depositing $33.5 …

Bitfinex and Tether have denied all allegations featured in an amended class action lawsuit filed against their parent company, iFinex Inc, according to a blog post published today by Bitfinex. The updated lawsuit, filed on June 3 in the Southern District of New York, accuses Bitfinex, Tether, Poloniex and affiliated firms of allegedly manipulating the crypto market. The initial lawsuit was filed in October 2019. The 156-page claim mentions Matthew Script, Benjamin Leibowitz, Jason Leibowitz, Aaron Leibowitz, and Pinchas Goldshtein as plaintiffs. They are represented by Selendy & Gay PLLC, Roche Cyrulink Freedman LLP and Schneider Wallace Cottrell Konecky LLP. …

Craig Wright maintains that he alone has access to the ‘Satoshi’ Bitcoin addresses filed in court, despite a message apparently signed by 145 of the addresses calling him “a liar and a fraud”. Wright says anyone that thinks his credibility is now in tatters as a result “doesn’t understand digital signatures at all”. He is being sued by the estate of his alleged former business partner Dave Kleiman, which is seeking a share of billions of dollars of Bitcoin (BTC) the pair may or may not have mined together. As part of the case, Wright filed a list of early …

New York City resident Vitalii Antonenko was charged for allegedly participating in a $94 million Bitcoins-for-cards scheme, according to a May 27 statement from the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts. He is now facing up to 20 years in jail and $500,000 in fines. Antonenko was arrested in March 2019 at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport after he arrived there from Ukraine carrying devices “that held hundreds of thousands of stolen payment card numbers”. According to the prosecution, the suspect and his co-conspirators used SQL injection attacks to extract payment card data from vulnerable …

The Kleiman estate's legal team has entered into evidence this week's revelation that 145 addresses claimed by Craig Wright are not controlled by him. They filed a notice of supplementary evidence supporting their motion for sanctions against Wright earlier this morning, adding to their laundry list of complaints against the Satoshi-claimant. They said the new evidence further proves the “CSW Filed List” is not a list of Wright’s Bitcoin public addresses but is instead a “purposeful fabrication” by him. The Kleiman estate is suing Wright over the Bitcoin he allegedly mined in a partnership with the late Dave Kleiman. ‘Liar …

India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, seems to finally be clarifying its stance on financial services for cryptocurrency-related businesses. In response to a right to information request, the RBI clarified that there are no restrictions on banks preventing them from providing an account to cryptocurrency companies or traders. The request was initially filed by Harish BV, a cofounder of local cryptocurrency exchange Unocoin. The Supreme Court’s decision on the crypto ban wasn’t the end In 2018, the RBI released a statement restricting all regulated entities including banks from dealing with any organization or individual traders transacting in cryptocurrencies. …

Telegram has withdrawn its appeal against a United States federal court’s injunction that froze Gram token issuance and distribution, according to court documents dated May 22. The move seems to suggest that the company has fully abandoned its TON plans. Earlier this month, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced their “active involvement” with the project was over, criticizing U.S. regulators for overextending their power. Announced in 2017, Telegram’s TON is a blockchain platform aimed at facilitating payments via Gram tokens and hosting decentralized applications at high scalability levels. After it raised almost $1.7 billion in two private token sale rounds next …

Eccentric cryptocurrency advocate John McAfee admitted his anonymity-oriented project Ghost “copy-pasted” parts of its white paper from the documentation for open-source privacy coin PIVX in a series of tweets today. He nonetheless appears to intend to sue PIVX for defamation. Ghost vs. PIVX — a brief recap Earlier this week, PIVX developers claimed that the Ghost white paper was plagiarized from an outdated 2018 PIVX white paper. According to them, “At least 20 of the 26 total pages” of the Ghost whitepaper “contain material directly plagiarized from the 2018 PIVX whitepaper.” At the time, a representative for Ghost explained to …

Major Bitcoin (BTC) derivatives exchange BitMEX went offline earlier on May 19, citing trading engine failure. The platform was inaccessible for a brief time, and is currently back online as of press time. “The BitMEX Trading Engine is currently down,” the company tweeted around 12:45 UTC time. Around 25 minutes after the initial announcement, Bitmex released an update, claiming that “all funds are safe, delayed orders will be rejected, and no liquidations will occur during downtime.” BitMEX went back online around 13:30 UTC time, initially in cancel only mode, meaning that no new orders could be placed at the time. …

BitMEX, one of the world’s largest crypto derivatives exchanges, has been accused in court of being “deliberately designed, from the ground up” to facilitate “a myriad of illegal activities.” The allegations were made in a major new lawsuit filed by BMA LLC in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on May 16. The plaintiff accuses BitMEX’s parent company — HDR Global Trading — and the exchange’s top executives — Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed — of engaging in or abetting multiple crimes that include racketeering, money laundering, wire fraud and operating an unlicensed …