Tang's DW

The Internet Archive saved a report on suspicious Bitcoin trading at MtGOX. Key allegations in the report:

• A bot named Willy by redditors was repeatedly dropping $2.5 million on Bitcoins, never selling, and opening a new account to repeat the process after spending the pre-set amount.
• Willy was able to make trades when MtGOX was disconnected from the Internet, suggesting that it ran from inside the MtGOX network or that it was able to backdate its trades.
• Willy's user IDs were significantly higher than the highest user IDs of normal users.
• A user nicknamed Markus by the report's author also had higher user IDs than those of normal users, and Markus stopped trading 7 hours before the first Willy user ID was created, suggesting that Markus may have been an earlier bot or the user that created Willy.
• Markus's purchases show the exact same currency value as the previous user's trade even when the bitcoin value is different, suggesting that the trade records were created from dirty memory either when the trades were recorded or when the report was generated, in either case without money changing hands.
• When MtGOX released an anonymized version of their trading logs, the new logs changed the currency values of Markus's trades to the market price and changed Markus's user ID to that of a user named MagicalTux, a name used by MtGOX CEO Mark Karpeles.

As of two days after this report was published, it has been taken down by Wordpress.

This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.

The report ends by openly accusing MtGOX of fraud, which probably attracted the attention of lawyers. The author should have kept to the data and let it explain itself.

[Edit June 05] Wordpress has restored the Willy Report blog.