Mt. Gox

It’s like the plot of an elaborate heist movie. Ocean's Eleven or Heat...except that this time, crooks didn't rip off a casino or a heavily fortified bank. Instead, they broke into a Bitcoin exchange. No elaborate cons or disguises, no battle with assault rifles on the streets of L.A. These thieves may not have gotten out of their jammies. (People still don't know all the details of what happened.)

Mt. Gox was the central Bitcoin exchange in the early 2010s. Based in Japan, more than 70% of Bitcoin trading took place on the exchange by 2014. However, that February, the company announced it was suspending trading after mounting customer complaints about slow withdrawals. Bitcoins had been disappearing from Mt. Gox for years. By the time the scandal came to light, around 850,000 Bitcoins were missing...about 740,000 from customers and approximately 100,000 from the company's own collection.

The lost cryptocurrency was worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time, and by late 2017 (after the Bitcoin market really picked up), the stolen Bitcoins would be valued at around $3 billion.

Around 200,000 of the bitcoins were eventually recovered, but the vast majority remained lost. Mt. Gox went bankrupt, with creditors claiming $2.4 trillion in lost assets. (That's right, trillion with a "t"...like you were talking about the U.S. federal budget, or the number of calories in an entire Cheesecake Factory cheesecake.) Unfortunately, the company only had about $91 million in assets to distribute.