Help! Bitcoin might have its first victims physically harmed (aka the BTC24 mess)

Dear fellow bitcoin-redditorz,

some of you might have read about it already - one of the biggest exchanges, UK/German-based bitcoin-24.com, went completely offline during Thursday night.

The operator, "Simon", on reddit as "TAiS46" (http://www.reddit.com/user/TAiS46 ) is apparently a poor fool who has set up the exchange on MySQL and PHP and was not even aware of basic transaction stuff and data type issues. (cf. this summarizing blog post here: http://kuttler.eu/post/what-happened-bitcoin24/ and the reddit http://redd.it/1c9hoa )

"Officially" he claims they shut his Polish bank account down, but apparently he got serious duplicate-transaction problems, or may be hacked/robbed of quite a bunch of BTCs.

You could think now, "bad luck for him, you know you can get your fingers burned in this biz". He did quite a lot of things pretty wrong and mindless. It might also be a scam. However it seems that this dude had the motive to be an early adopter and just promote trading here in Europe, without making much of a dime, or trade nastily himself to get instant richness. (see http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1b1clt/all_you_mtgox_traders_out_there/c93ahdn ) The shit must have hit the fan when the bitcoin-hype exploded last week and everyone was mad to get coins, completely overwhelming the guy with the new demand for this exchange.

We all read the heartwarming reddit from the pal who could finally pay back all his dept through some all-in-style BTC trading. However I feel that this issue here should be upvoted to be at least as popular, as the exchange operator will obviously get into serious trouble, his life and probably his family's completely destroyed - there are threatening posts on btc24's timelime ( https://www.facebook.com/bitcoin.24?ref=ts&fref=ts ), don't wanna know, what some greedy traders who have not got their risk handling right might do to him, and how his mailbox looks like at the moment. That could even scare the shit out of Chuck Norris. I fear other people amongst the probably 1000 users might seriously stalk him, intending physical harm. And imagine they could hunt down the wrong "Simon Hausberg" who has nothing to do with this.

I think it is both a lesson for everyone to learn about the current state of the BTC system, and also probably a chance for the community to stick together and help each other out defending against the criminal energy. I imagine some really bad stories arising out of this incident - individual fates destroyed, suicidal platform operator, bad media vibes. Someone posted that he has invested his entire life savings into this exchange... (stupid again, but yeah, that's probably how we humans are)

As Simon has not made any new posts during the last days (I imagine he is in a shock state), I'm not sure if anyone can help him and what exactly would be needed. Probably you can follow this post and I'll post again if there's something new to report. However it would be damn cool if we could support him in any way, at least with encouraging words...

What do you think?

P.S.: Disclaimer #1: I got money transferred to there too, so I'd of course profit from the service recovering. However that's not my intention of posting here. I have expected from the beginning to lose everything. Lost some money, but gained experience and at least proved that my feelings were right. Just feel sorry for this fool - I guess he must have been sleepless during the last 48 hours.

Disclaimer #2: Of course there is still the possibility that this is staged and bitcoin-24.com is a scam. However everything points into the direction that they got hacked because of incompetence, and the foolish operator will experience the most terrible time of his life now. I don't wish that to my worst enemy.

Disclaimer #3: The facts are, that there are no facts. I tried to summarize everything here that surfaced within the last days, there might not even be a major problem, or it's another one of the manifold bad things that could have happend (lost backups, lost private keys, etc. etc.).

EDIT: Update 2013-15. Simon seems to have surfaced again on Reddit. He stated again that the only problem are his bank accounts being suspended by the German & Polish governments. That calms down the situation a bit for the moment, however it might be that the situation escalates in case he does not manage to get his accounts active again. On a side note, it's also interesting how immediately a scam popped up claiming to be the new bitcoin-24.com alpha version, asking users to enter their account details there. Someone once argued bitcoin to be just like the Wild West; that's a bit of an understatement I suppose. Scam, scam everywhere.