The long running saga of the missing $460 million worth of Bitcoins from former Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox may be finally heading to court with reports that Japanese police are preparing to charge Founder and former Chief Executive Officer Mark Karpeles over the theft.

A report from Japan’s Nikkei (link in Japanese) Friday morning local time said that Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department will file charges of “fraudulently producing and using private electromagnetic records” on the basis of evidence that indicates that Karpeles fraudulently manipulated the cryptocurrency system and inflated the Bitcoin balance in bogus accounts that belonged to Mt. Gox.

The same report claims that local police are also looking into pursuing charges of corporate embezzlement, although notes that the 650,000 Bitcoins stolen figure that circulated in 2014 may be exaggerated as at least some of those Bitcoins may never have actually existed.

Claims that the collapse of Mt. Gox and the theft was an inside job first surfaced in March 2014, but received further confirmation from Japanese police in January, who revealed that only 7,000 of the 650,000 missing Bitcoins could be attributed to hacking.

A report from Bitcoin security firm Wizsec in April not only confirmed that the missing Bitcoins were not hacked, but raised for the first time the possibility that many of the Bitcoins simply weren’t held by Mt. Gox at the time of its collapse, and further that Bitcoins had started disappearing from the company as early as 2011.

Sordid tale

It’s not clear from reports if Karples is even still in Japan, although the Mt. Gox bankruptcy case remains ongoing at the time of writing, with the last news on the case being an extension of time for creditors to makes claims earlier this month.

What we do know for sure is that thousands of users lost Bitcoin in the case, although how much the figure from this sordid tale comes to is the thousand Bitcoin question as it would appear that a sizable number of Bitcoins sold by the exchange never existed to begin with, turning the case into one of embezzlement rather than just straight theft.

What ever the charge, many in the Bitcoin community will be highly pleased to see Karples bought to justice, not just for the losses many suffered, but for the negative publicity the scum bag caused for Bitcoin as a whole, the ramifications of which are still be fought today.

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