In Gox's case, I don't think Karpeles' intention was to simply steal everyone's money and let Gox go up in smoke in the public eye. I think his intention was to use his power to ramp and crash the Bitcoin market. He could profit massively from the ramps, and then cover his fractional reserve activities on the crashes....but somehow things got out from under his control.....he could have been attacked by hackers like has been suggested or maybe he just started to lose the ability to totally boss the market.
I agree that the collapse of MtGOX must have been due to a combination of unethical insider trading/manipulation and bad luck. I disagree on the details, however. I don't think that Mark had the power to create the rally; as you must know already, I believe the rally was real, due to the opening of the Chinese market, and "Markus"/"Willy" was merely doing arbitrage with China, possibly with non-existent money. And the crash was due to the Chinese Government's decree. But I wonder whether we will know the truth some day.
However, I also remember Gox getting all manner of 'seals of approvals' or pseudo audits done when their integrity came under question.
Indeed. I am quite convinced that there were several other people, besides Mark and Gonzague, who knew what was going on inside MtGOX, and profited from it.
Indeed, even during the Goxcoin period, there were people on this forum swearing blind that everything would come good in the end, etc etc.
Just as there were many people on this forum swearing that all was fine with Neo & Bee, weeks after Danny Brewster had disappeared with all the money that was left. Some even went as far as claiming that they had flown from Greece to Cyprus, visited the offices, and saw that everybody was still there working as usual.
Hey, what is wrong with telling a few lies in order to convince other people to buy, while I sell? What is anonymity good for, if not for that?