Earlier this week, four users of the well-known Bitcoin trading platform Bitcoinica filed a complaint in a San Francisco court asking for $460,457.70 from the company. The plaintiffs allege that Bitcoinica, which had been hacked twice earlier this year, neglected the safety of its users’ money, and cheated them out of withdrawal requests that it said it would honor.
Bitcoins, units of virtual currency which are cryptographically signed and transferred without the influence of banks or government oversight, experienced a boom about a year ago (in June 2011 one BTC was equivalent to $15), but crashed to less than $3 only 5 months later when slews of Bitcoin-stealing malware and hacks of Bitcoin “banks” unsettled the market. The nascent currency bounced back, however, and the price of Bitcoins surged this past July, rising above $9 for the first time in a year.
More:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/bitcoinica-users-sue-for-460k-in-lost-bitcoins/
