Quote from: Cellcote on August 06, 2011, 11:21:12 AM

There is a new announcement on the page:

Quote

Friday, August 5th, 2011

From the desk of Tom Williams, operator of MyBitcoin.com

We are in the process of building a claim procedure for the remainder of the holdings now. We expect that we will have it online soon.

The claim process will consist of a online form where the claimant will be required to enter their MyBitcoin username and password. Their balance will be displayed along with the percentage of remaining Bitcoins that we still have in our holdings. That percentage will be paid to a Bitcoin address of their choosing. This percentage will be based on our current total liabilities vs. our existing assets. We will disclose these figures as soon as they have been totaled.

Each online claim will be written to a ledger and will be manually approved within 48 hours of being filed online. We have decided to have a manual claim approval process for better security. The last thing we all need right now is for someone to breach the claim form. We are confident clients will find this satisfactory.

Tom Williams

So this is someone who has taken bitcoins from everyone who would give them to him for a relatively moderate amount - I say relatively moderate because 250k $ is not much in business - and who is either unwilling or unable to stand up and pay back the money (value) he took in to safeguard. Evidence is his babble about a "claim process" which predictably will yield little or nothing for those who gave him bitcoins in the first place.

It's a lesson to be learned:

Don't trust ANYONE with your bitcoins. Keep them in your wallet on your computer, with a backup handy just in case.

I wonder how many of those cases it will take for people to realize that there is a price to pay for being improvident...

And yes, going to the police will only hasten the demise of bitcoin as a whole.

You either are independent of the authorities or you aren't. Police investigating and courts deciding means you aren't.