> Some of the funds moved to BTC-e seem to have moved straight to internal storage rather than customer deposit addresses, hinting at a relationship between Vinnik and BTC-e.
and he was stupid enough to deposit them back to his account on MtGox:
> Moving coins back onto MtGox was what let us identify Vinnik, as the MtGox accounts he used could be linked to his online identity "WME" http://archive.is/6cFcY
All in all, there a strong suggestion that he participated in money laundering and was involved in the whole scheme.
I wonder, if BTC-e somehow artificially pumped the bitcoin valuation leveraging the huge amount of bitcoins they put hands on, same as what MtGox did.
Also, it looks like that Mark Karpeles wasn't involved in the whole scheme, and the hack was that simple thanks to the low or no security and engineering culture at MtGox:
> In September 2011, the MtGox hot wallet private keys were stolen, in a case of a simple copied wallet.dat file.
> the shared keypool of the wallet.dat file lead to address reuse, which confused MtGox's systems into mistakenly interpreting some of the thief's spending as deposits, crediting multiple user accounts with large sums of BTC and causing MtGox's numbers to go further out of balance by about 40,000 BTC. None of these users seem to have reported their "sudden luck".