After reading all that I am still not sure what the point is.  All those pics kinda look like the same guy to me.  Even if they are not, lets just assume they are not, he could have used a photo that he perceived would be better for whatever audience he was talking to at the time.  I still don't see why we should worry about this guy?  Or his company?  As far as Mu x-, the name being different, it is very common for an asian (especially in business) to use a fake western name.  This is simply because asian names can be exceedingly dificult for westerners to pronounce.

I would suggest that before you continue with this guy you may want to come up with something concrete as to why you are suspicious.  This is a real guy and a real business, investors spending money, employees, etc.  Why torpedo that without any evidence?  It just isn't right.

I guess that BTCJam is clinically dead or only able to trick some newbies into lending.

Just received one more arbitration note. Funny. The guy who asked for the money is, according to BTCJam's rating, fully identified. Now what identifiers did I get? A German name and a german address. A british phone number. A chinese Facebook-profile. A fake driver's license.

So basically, BTCJam IS part of the fraud for they are not checking ANY information of the lenders at all, while still claiming that they are identified.

I call BTCJam a fraud.

The important truths

Truth 1: My $40K LR transaction is legitimate at AurumXchange, associated with a friend in Singapore.
Truth 2: All my assets at Mt. Gox, my wallet balances, my recent Bitcoin transactions and the 5,000 BTC compensation are from legitimate sources.
Truth 3: I had no knowledge of myself being suspicious until the public statement was posted by AurumXchange. There's no possible way of me being involved in the investigation earlier.
Truth 4: Even though there's evidence showing that I'm linked to this hack, I have absolutely no relationship with all previous hacks.
Truth 5: If either AurumXchange or Mt. Gox had communicated their investigation with me earlier, there wouldn't be so many wrong interpretations and assumptions and this thread could have come out much earlier.
Truth 6: I didn't steal the money.

Who is Chen Jianhai?

Chen Jianhai is my previous business associate. He was very familiar with credit card fraud and by my observations he's quite active in financial black markets. He didn't know much technical stuff personally but he has many technical people working with him everyday. He heard about Bitcoin from me last year from a random chat, and I have not communicated with him this year.

Did he admit the wrong-doing?

Surprisingly, yes. He strongly denied at first, but he changed his attitude entirely when I mention that this matter is an international-scale crime, and intelligent netizens from all over the world are actively investigating this matter. And I also told him that the accidentally exposed a bank account number. (He claimed that it was a debit card purchased from black market.)

He used my secret identity because he felt that "it would be impossible to discover the hacker" and "it would be much easier to deny if the suspect account is an insider because you (Zhou Tong) can always distract people from investigating". I have repeatedly said that I have zero tolerance in this matter and I will report all his information, including his real bank account number and address to the police once the official investigation has started.

How did he do it?

He said one of his co-workers was quite active in Chinese Bitcoin community and he had noticed the source code of Bitcoinica being leaked. The reason that he (the technical guy) knew the correlation between the Mt. Gox API key and the LastPass master password remains unknown. I have only communicated this password in-person with Tihan in Chimelong Hotel (Guangzhou) lobby once in February this year and I'm quite sure that no one else has paid any attention to our conversation.

He was unwilling to share more information about the specifics of the hack, but he remembered that he only thought of using my secret identity *after* he was able to withdraw money from Mt. Gox. It was possible that he only withdrew the Bitcoins first, and then a few moments later, the USD.

Also he revealed an important piece of information not mentioned in the public statements: He used the Mt. Gox account of Chris Heaslip, which is a verified account, to deposit some Mt. Gox code and buy Bitcoins with the money, and withdrew all of them. This account's credentials were also in the LastPass account.

In the entire process, he used My Wallet (Blockchain.info) with Tor to access the Bitcoins, and he transferred some Bitcoins to his servers in United States as well. The IP 184.22.31.180 (which was used to access Mt. Gox accounts) is actually zeraba.ddns.info. This is actually a public SSH proxy server for some Chinese users to bypass the national firewall with randomly rotating passwords. He had attempted to access the Mt. Gox accounts with Tor and he failed (note: Mt. Gox bans all Tor exit nodes).

How about the money?

He's a multi-millionaire in China living with a family. I'm not sure how much of his money comes from illegal sources but he has a genuine interest in relic collections and he has made a lot of money from speculating precious collections.

After my warning, he seemed unwilling to return the funds. However, I have threatened him with reporting his information to the police. He later more or less agreed to return the funds to Bitcoinica users, under the condition that Bitcoinica will no longer pursue the case (and Bitcoinica isn't pursuing at the moment) and I keep his other personal information secret.

I'm currently in a moral dilemma because even though I don't have definitive proof that Chen Jianhai is indeed a long-time criminal with an active presence in stolen credit cards and possibly other hacks, it might be worthwhile to pursue with police investigation so that justice can be served. However doing that will significantly delay the claiming process of Bitcoinica and the Chinese police may not be willing or capable to effectively investigate or co-operate in this matter. Otherwise I can always get all the stolen funds from him first. The only evidence in my email account was a credit card fraud case of only a few hundred dollars, which isn't very significant compared to the Bitcoinica hack.

Currently I'm very willing to co-operate with any investigation because this is the only way I can completely prove my innocence. However the non-reponse from Bitcoinica side is indeed worrying. I have gathered some data to estimate the amount that can be recovered from Chen Jianhai:

USD: about $140,000 + $5000 frozen at AurumXchange (under SJ account)
BTC: about 20,000 BTC

There's an unknown amount of funds left in Chris Heaslip's account and I have no way of knowing the exact balance.

It's important to note that the pending $40,000 transaction at AurumXchange is my genuine transaction, so it can be used to offset the USD payment. And also all Bitcoin balances in my Mt. Gox account are mine, and it shouldn't be used to further compensate Bitcoinica customers as well.

However, my previous donation of 5,000 BTC and community donation of 101 BTC were entirely separate from this matter and the claimants can rightfully hold on to the full amount. These funds come from my profits of previous sale at Bitcoinica, and I genuinely feel that Bitcoinica users deserve the early compensation due to them being affected by the inefficiencies of Bitcoinica's operations.

Chen Jianhai was only able to offer the above-mentioned amount due to the cost of his laundering activities and also the significantly lower Bitcoin price when he cashed out. If Bitcoinica or the community wants him to cover the full amount at today's prices, I'm willing to co-operate with any police investigation. But either case, my previous donation should have pretty much covered the difference.

It's up to Bitcoinica to appoint a bank account and also a Bitcoin address so that Chen Jianhai (or possibly I) can return the funds. AurumXchange can either return the $40,000 to me, or send the funds to Bitcoinica's nominated account (in which case another $100,000 will be sent to Bitcoinica from Chen Jianhai or me).

About my situation

I'm not asking him to transfer to me or to anyone else the amount today because it can be illegal to possess such funds until Bitcoinica has provided any written form of authorisation and/or agreement (so that I won't be wronged again because of arranging the return of the stolen funds).

It's important to note that I have been, I am and I will always be standing on the side of Bitcoinica customers, regardless of my position and situation at Bitcoinica. I have absolutely no tolerance of illegal activity of any kind, especially those damaging my personal reputation.

I promise that I have honestly reported the amounts and 100% of those recovered from Chen Jianhai will be returned to Bitcoinica's customers. At the same time, I have to emphasise that Bitcoinica should return the amounts to customers as quickly as possible, so that the company and related people will not get into serious legal troubles. It's my best interest to make Bitcoinica's customers happy so that this issue will not have further impact on my future careers.

I have no problem of either formal police investigation, or returning the funds without police investigation. I would prefer the former so that my name can be cleared, but I guess that some Bitcoinica customers may choose the latter.

Sitenote: I have released an improved design of NameTerrific (https://www.nameterrific.com/), which I finished during my lunch break, until AurumXchange's statement was posted.

now you've lost me completely.
These guys are bloggers, the one South African guy has a translated Chinese to English blog, the Chinese guy wants to write and translate....

what is criminal? he's doing copy-writing for the wallet service mine in OP?
Nothing criminal.

he has been published before attending university? no crime there...

pardon me for being confused, but i just dont see any wrong doings here. Eric is weird looking baby-man, the other guy is...well... South African

still not actually illegal. I feel like you are reading too much into this, but those bad translations give me a headache, so who knows?

I'm not going to buy any shares in their IPO either way, maybe shares in the translation blog...

wheres the post describing Jeremy's criminal past? did he pay to have it removed?

also not illegal, just unethical journalism.

maybe this has something to do with the whole mystery...http://www.danwei.com/wizard-arrested-for-raping-buddhist/

In contrast to my previous posts, I'm not planning on spending much space in this one proving that Butterfly Labs should think twice before it decides to introduce absurd, baseless, terror-ridden lawsuits intended to destroy the lives of countless innocent people. Most people already seem to understand that. Instead, I'll be discussing its sophomoric, confused arguments and how it uses them to destroy any resistance by channeling it into ineffective paths. For complete details, I refer you to many already existing threads on that. I shall here mention only a few random items that may be new or especially interesting to you. For instance, if we're not careful, its pretentious mind games will throw us into a third world war in a matter of days.

Given a choice of having Butterfly Labs install a feudal enclave in the midst of the Bitcoin space that pledges allegiance to its deplorable phalanx of reprehensible, ill-tempered soi-disant do-badders or having my bicuspids extracted sans Novocaine, I would embrace the pliers, purchase some Polident Partials, and call it a day. Butterfly Labs's campaigns of terror are a mere cavil, a mere scarecrow, one of the last shifts of a desperate and dying cause. Butterfly Labs occasionally shows what appears to be warmth, joy, love, or compassion. You should realize, however, that these positive expressions are more feigned than experienced and invariably serve an ulterior motive, such as to subject people to daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities. Griping about Butterfly Labs will not make it stop trying to start wars, ruin the environment, invent diseases, and routinely do a hundred other things that kill people. But even if it did, it would just find some other way to disparage and ridicule our traditional heroes and role models. If Butterfly Labs got its way, it'd be able to lay all of society open to the predations of organized criminality. Brrrr! It sends chills down my spine just thinking about that.

We must reveal some shocking facts about Butterfly Labs's ballyhoos. If we do, then perhaps a brighter day will dawn on planet Earth. Perhaps people will open their eyes and see that in this world, there are twisted, stupid blusterers. There are undiplomatic nithings. There are scum who walk like men. And then there is Butterfly Labs. Of those, I avouch that Butterfly Labs is the most malignant because it's doing some pretty self-centered things. Or, to restate that without meiosis, Butterfly Labs wants to exercise both subtlety and thoroughness in managing both the Bitcoins and miners that gets presented to us. Personally, I don't want that. Personally, I prefer freedom. If you also prefer freedom then you should be working with me to answer the ill-bred boors who promote a form of government in which religious freedom, racial equality, and individual liberty are severely at risk.

The concept of risk includes the relationship between the consequences and probability of an event. If the consequences of an event are extremely negative, such as the devastation resulting from Butterfly Labs mollycoddling loopy twits, then you want the probability of the event occurring to be vanishingly small, as close to zero as possible. Unfortunately, the likelihood of Butterfly Labs playing on people's conscious and unconscious belief structures is so high that one can't help but conclude that it has been brought to my attention that within the deleterious milieu of mammonism exists the opportunity for it to goad querimonious, rebarbative-to-the-core lip flappers into hurling epithets at its critics. While this is unequivocally true, it has nothing but contempt for you, and you don't even know it. That's why I feel obligated to inform you that what's scary is that it has had some success at taking away our sense of community and leaving us morally adrift. Even worse, it seems likely that Butterfly Labs will launch a salvo of pushy propositions against the somber, oppressed masses in the near future if it so deigns to undermine solemn humanity. Although things may seem dark now, Butterfly Labs can't prevent the sun from rising. It can't prevent me from writing that its cause is not glorious. It is not wonderful. It is not good.

Butterfly Labs and its expositors are, by nature, insipid rabble-rousers. Not only can that nature not be changed by window-dressing or persiflage, but Butterfly Labs bites the hand that feeds it. Please re-read and memorize that sentence if you still believe that Butterfly Labs is a refined organization with the soundest ethics and morals you can imagine.

All I can tell you is what matters to me: Butterfly Labs likes ruses that implement a fickle parody of justice called “Butterfly Labs-ism”. Could there be a conflict of interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that Butterfly Labs has repeatedly indicated a desire to exhibit cruelty to bitcoiners. Is that the sound of rarefied respectability that Butterfly Labs's apple-polishers so frequently attribute to Butterfly Labs? The reckless blathering of a conniving goldbrick is more like it. In fact, Butterfly Labs's grand plan is to bring discord, confusion, and frustration into our personal and public lives. I'm sure Mao Tse Tung would approve. In any case, Butterfly Labs deeply believes that everyone who is inviting all the people who have been harmed by Butterfly Labs to continue to express and assert their concerns in a constructive and productive fashion has a dark, ulterior motive for doing so. It may suit Butterfly Labs's world view to assume that the intentions of its castigators are malicious, but unless it can read minds, it's difficult to impossible for anyone to verify that assumption. Hence, let me make the counterproposal that the reality is that it frequently accuses its detractors of funding a vast web of vainglorious, petty quodlibetarians (in the most ironic fashion!), warped, frightful half-wits, and the most barbaric grobians you'll ever see. This is yet another example of the growing lack of civility in our civil discourse that ranges from the volage-brained to the cynical and even grumpy. In a more proper debate, one would instead politely point out that over the past couple of years I have had occasion to evaluate Butterfly Labs's sottises in terms of their ability to kill the goose bearing the golden egg. What I have delineated shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that trying to keep Butterfly Labs from reducing our modern, civilized, industrialized society to a state of mindless, primitive barbarism is a sucker's game. No matter how hard we try to stop it, it'll always find some new way to waste our time and money.

Butterfly Labs may attempt to insist that only one or two members of its entire entourage are vile lobcocks. Only one or two members? This is, to put it charitably, an understatement of the facts. It would be far more accurate to say that Butterfly Labs keeps saying that without its superior guidance, we will go nowhere. This is exemplary of the nonsensical rhetoric and scaremongering that typifies the language of officious ingrates and other dysfunctional, overweening kooks. A large number of people are immensely outraged at Butterfly Labs. Butterfly Labs should ask itself what it has done to incur such wrath. One possibility is that Butterfly Labs is interpersonally exploitative. That is, it takes advantage of others to achieve its own maledicent ends. Why does it do that? The answer should be self-evident so let me just point out that I personally am growing weary of Butterfly Labs's repeated claims that it is a paragon of morality and wisdom. Here, I invoke the Royal Society's famous motto, Nullius in verba: take no one's word for it. That is, we should rely not on opinions but on objective information as has been made available in this forum to determine whether or not Butterfly Labs's remonstrations are dotty by any measure. Given that they're intended to create a factitious demand for Butterfly Labs's inarticulate grievances, they come close to being a crime.

Butterfly Labs' superficial, froward diatribes are a shout to the world that, any day now, Butterfly Labs will advocate its Ponzi schemes amid a hue and cry as mendacious as it is avaricious. In this case, one cannot help but recall that Butterfly Labs's reportages are all too often clad in the lazy garb of Comstockism. I hardly need to add that its crew loves befuddling the public and making sin seem like merely a sophisticated fashion. This is nothing less than a betrayal of the many by the few. Needless to say, we must expose some of Butterfly Labs's beggarly, piteous deeds. If we fail then all of our sacrifices and all of the dreams and sacrifices of our forebears will have been in vain. The key is to realize that Butterfly Labs keeps trying to deceive us into thinking that it would never dream of converting freedom of speech from a human right into a tool of oppression that must be blunted by force. The purpose of this deception may be to impose orthodoxy and suppress dissent. Oh what a tangled web Butterfly Labs weaves when first it practices to deceive.

Okay, I've written enough for one post, so let me just finish by saying that the world would be better off if Butterfly Labs had never been created.

OK OK Gleb Gamow, I see you are hot on the trail of this Eric mu guy... I still don't really see what you think might be going on?

I'm not saying your intel is wrong or anything... its just that maybe you are "splitting hairs"

what do you suggest is going on here? Don't be afraid to make accusations... its all hypothetical at this point. What do you think "eric mu" has to gain from this article?

just because someone is hard to identify online does not guarantee they are a crook. If it did, we are all guilty, no?

I'm interested in this... dont get me wrong... if it is a scam I'd love to see it taken to task. I just need some better proof, and I'm not much of an internet detective.

reserved for interest.

well, a shamwow would have to include both a sham and a wow.

this article could be construed as a mild "wow" but I see no "sham"

what are they selling? where is the scam?

I see they are a wallet service, so maybe this article (if a scam) is presented to give the impression that they are running an honest business. still not wowed. If I take the article and photos, and even background of the writer as truth, this is at best a modest operation. We will have to see if they start asking for funding somewhere or somehow...

If the whole thing is set up to get people to place their BTC in the trust of the wallet service so that they can abscond with the money and vanish, they are going to pretty elaborate lengths to do so.

It looks more to me that the writer is actually quite passionate about his writing career, and having a good time doing some hands on immersive journalism, probably a welcome respite from the crushing boredom of sitting around in the middle of nowhere looking after a bunch of droning machines. He comes off as an excited amateur more than any sort of scammer.

The 60 degrees Celsius part could just be a poor estimation. I can never get the temperature correct by guessing. However... 60 degrees Celsius would kill you. He could be factoring in humidity which makes it feel hotter. Or he confused Celsius with Fahrenheit... whenever it gets hotter than 29 celcius I start saying stuff like "It must be a million degrees in here!" so bad numbers regarding the weather don't really concern me.

Anyways, good for you being ever vigilant OP, but I think this one is a wait and see proposition. You've raised a red flag whether valid or not, and there is at least one voice to warn against potential scamming. Still there is no smoking gun yet. Lets see if they start asking for money...

And since when is proper grammar any indication of anything besides proper grammar? I know more unimpressive, average minds who are sticklers for spelling and grammar.... but never have anything deep to say or anything interesting to add... just go look at reddit for about 4 seconds, you will see what I mean.

If perfect grammar is some high watermark for excellence in communication you can go to the library right now and basically burn every major work of literature written since world war 2.

Those are nice little articles but I would have to say "no" to the shamwow. Not enough wow.

I was not as impressed as OP and fail to see what exactly blew his mind. I read articles every day. These two don't stand out that much. I'm curious to know why you think it's a shamwow.

As stated earlier, people who learn English in a foreign land often speak and write way better than us lazy privileged westerners. Check India! Or visit a doctor in Mexico! They actually think about what they are saying before they speak.

If OP really thinks shamwow is happening here he's actually doing more to promote it than anything.
All I can think is... Are any of those miners the ones FriedCat stole from ASICminer?

I was buying the story until this ...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1072474.0
Three months living in a multi-petahash BTC mine in Kangding, Sichuan, China  (Read 8086 times)

Have you worked in China?
I have. They have all kinds of fancy job titles for shitjobs working in stuff like replacing broken down miners.

I totally believe that guy working in some remote place in China with cheap electricity can be a so called "Chief Marketing Officer" - whatever the fuck his day to day duty is.