TOKYO: Mark Karpeles rose to head a firm that once claimed to handle 80 percent of the world’s bitcoin transactions.
But his lavish Tokyo lifestyle came to an abrupt end when prosecutors charged him with creaming off millions of dollars of customer deposits from his cryptocurrency exchange MtGox. In many ways, the trajectory of the Frenchman, now 33, mirrors the volatile rise and fall of the bitcoin currency itself. According to his mother, he had few friends at school, as he was “unable to find a buddy who could talk like he could about IT and quantum physics”. The “only thing that interested” her “talented” son was computer science, according to his mother, speaking in a 2017 documentary.
Karpeles, whose real first name is Robert, himself admitted to French television that he would spend entire days in front of the computer screen without the slightest bit of physical activity. Entering the professional world, he quickly found himself at odds with his French company Linux Cyberjoueurs, which found irregularities in its data and pointed the finger at Karpeles. The firm brought the case to the authorities and in 2010, he received a year’s suspended sentence in absentia in France for “fraudulent access of an automated data processing system” and “fraudulent altering of data”. But by this time, Karpeles was in Japan, which he had visited several years previously and found the people and culture to his liking. Once in Japan, he founded his own company, called Tibanne – after his cat.
