Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based private equity company, has raised its offer to purchase the claims of Mt. Gox victims amid the ongoing Bitcoin rally.
As reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, the company is now offering $1,300 for each Bitcoin or 88 percent of its estimated account value. The company was offering $755 per Bitcoin in December while the offering dropped to as low as $600 last March.
Fortress is sending letters to the creditors of the doomed crypto exchange who are still in line to receive their lost funds.
As reported by Finance Magnates earlier, the firm is willing to pay the creditors either in Bitcoin or any fiat of their choice, and the payment will be made within ten days of the claim transfer confirmation.
Per Michael Hourigan, a managing director at Fortress, the firm is making the discount offer “due to the likely timeline (3 to 5 years) and financial risk of the ongoing litigations” involved in getting money from the now-defunct crypto exchange.
Fall of a giant
Once handling 70 percent of all Bitcoin trading, Mt. Gox was closed down in 2014 as it went bankrupt following financial woes. The problems of the Japanese exchange were initiated in late 2011 after the theft of 850,000 Bitcoin, then worth $450 million.
Though the victims’ woes were lessened in 2018 as a Japanese court changed the status of the exchange from bankruptcy to civil rehabilitation, the rehabilitator failed to compensate them even after years.
Mark Karpeles, the former CEO of the doomed exchange who headed it from 2011 to 2014, also facing multiple class-action lawsuits brought by Mt. Gox victims. A Japanese also convicted him for data manipulation in the exchange, however, acquitted him for embezzlement.
Last year, a Rusian law firm was also claiming to recover the lost funds of the exchange’s victims for a fee of up to 75 percent of the recovered amount.
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