MtGox is not the first exchange were owners claimed they were robbed, ran with the money and later gave the victims part of the money back:
According to an anonymous high-profile source, the first and original bitcoin scam was the online coin wallet Mybitcoin.com. People would deposit hundreds of thousands of coins there, as the currency was new and hundreds of thousands of coins weren’t yet worth a lot.
Then, on July 29, 2011, the site went blank, just like the Gox website did. People panicked and gradually accepted a catastrophic loss of funds.
On August 11, 14 days later, the site came back online and declared – just like Gox – that they “had been hacked”, had filed for bankruptcy protection, just like Gox, but “had managed to recover” 49% of the funds. People could fill out claim forms to recover these funds – 49% of their original balance. As this was enough time for most people to internalize the loss, they were happy again at the sudden windfall; things suddenly weren’t as bad as they had seemed. In the meantime, the anonymous person who ran mybitcoin.com disappeared with a huge amount of money, according to the source.
In other words, the scam cynically exploited people’s loss and grief to actually make them happy when they got something back. Most “hacks” of bitcoin sites since then have actually been copycat scams of mybitcoin.com, again according to this source. - See more at:
http://www.dailytech.com/Bitcoin+King+Pt+II+Mt+Goxs+Dictator+Karpels+Proves+Tragically+Flawed/article34452.htm#sthash.upwWVHJk.dpuf
