I was a customer of Bitcoin-24 about this time last year, when it was the top exchange for trading EURs (Mt.Gox was nowhere near their volume at the time).
There was no bankrupt of collapse, the problem there was very poor programming, which caused some bugs which where exploited to siphon money out of the system; when the owner discovered this, he closed down the site and some serious legal troubles began; he actually was the stereotypical kid in a basement, with no real programming or financial expertise, and got trapped in something much bigger than him. Sort of like a Karpeles with good intentions and less ego, but still a total amateur which shouldn't have ever got near other people's money.
For reference, he was posting questions like these on a famous programming Q&A site,
while the Exchange had already been up and running for months:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15026825/php-mysql-how-to-prevent-two-requests-updatehttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/15165559/how-to-round-amounts-correct-update-1Yes, you read it correctly.
He didn't even know the basics about database transactions and rounding errors.
I personally had only sent them 100 EUR and got them back after a few weeks, but I don't think everyone actually got everything back; I don't know if there were legal actions, and what their outcome was.
Now it looks like everything is different, only the company name was not changed; the new company is UK-based, and is managed by completely different people:
https://bitcoin-24.com/about. My old login doesn't work anymore and I was able to register again using the same email address and username, thus it's very likely they discarded the previous user database and started from scratch.
And yet, the site still looks quite amateurish. It's full of spelling errors, it has various layout problems, the automated login notification emails report a wrong IP adddress... and
the "forgot your password" link on the login page doesn't even work!They don't really seem any better than before.
