Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1
MyLegacyKit (Link to original medium.com post)
Gregor Sailer: Carson City VI/Vågårda, Sweden, from the series “The Potemkin Village”, 2016
Written by Arthur van Pelt, with assistance from CryptoDevil
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material might become available
after publication of this article, it will have edits and updates every now
and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress,
to become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
How did Craig Wright (full name Craig Steven Wright) become one of a
plethora of modern day Satoshi Nakamoto pretenders — of whom Jorg Molt,
accused of defrauding $214 million from 50 investors, was finally arrested a
few weeks ago?
Let’s try to find an answer to this question, and map out what we know
about the years 2003–2013 (Ryan v Wright lawsuit, and aftermath) and
2011, when Craig apparently first learned about Bitcoin, up till the very end
of 2015 when Wired and Gizmodo magazines published their now infamous
articles about Craig Wright possibly being Satoshi Nakamoto. And let’s not
forget about the ATO raids that quickly followed the next day! Are these
events related after all, or not?
One of the most infamous Craig “Faketoshi” Wright forgeries backdated March 2008, created after April 2013. The
domain information-defense.com was only registered in January 2009, for example.
In this series of three articles, we will learn everything about the Ryan v
Wright lawsuit that ran from 2003 to 2006, including all appeals, but had an
aftermath till 2013 which almost caused Craig to go bankrupt. Then there’s
the fraudulent 2013 New South Wales Supreme Court claims, the extremely
thorough ATO inquiry in 2013 — 2015, and we will of course show the reader
a fair number of the numerous forgeries that Craig Wright created in 2013,
2014 and 2015 to support his Bitcoin fraud and false Satoshi claims.
Part 1 will cover November 2003 — February 2014.
Part 2 will cover February 2014 — December 2014.
Part 3 will cover January 2015 — December 2015.
Disclaimer: You will see many times the $ symbol being used. Since Craig
Wright lived in Australia in the period of these articles, the $ symbol used in
numbers related to Craig will always refer to the Australian dollar (AUD),
except where indicated otherwise.
The Run Up
In 1999, Craig raised one Australian company:
Vin De La Terre Pty Ltd (June 9, 1999)
which morphed into DeMorgan Information Security Systems Pty Ltd
(December 17, 2001)
In 2001, Craig raised another Australian company:
Ridges Estate Pty Ltd (December 17, 2001)
Let us begin, at the outset, by framing both the character and the historical
behaviour of Craig Wright, in providing you a summary of his legal
'difficulties' arising from a breach of contract and subsequent contempt of
court in 2003.
Original hearing October 30, 2003 and resulting Judgement November 6,
2003
Craig and Lynn Wright were, in a personal capacity and through ownership
of a corporate entity shareholder, the majority owners of the Australian
company DeMorgan Information Security Systems Pty Limited.
"The company’s business includes the provision of information technology
consulting services in general, and specifically the monitoring of computer
systems to guard against “hackers” or other unauthorised intruders."
Its main customers were the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), Craig's
former employer, along with the Rail Infrastructure Corporation (RIC) and a
number of other businesses. At the end of June 2003, the shareholders of
DeMorgan entered into an agreement with Michael Ryan, to sell 5% of the
company shares to him for $50,000. Part of the agreement included a non-
compete clause which, it doesn't take a law degree to understand, precludes
those involved from attempting to poach the company's clients should they
subsequently leave its employ.
One month later, following their new investor’s all-too-late discovery of
questionable spending within the company, Craig and Lynn Wright resigned
as directors and, you guessed it, Craig set about approaching DeMorgan's
clients for business, including his former employer the ASX, where he still
maintained a good relationship with its employees, with him being cited as
claiming he would “spend over a million dollars to see DeMorgan go under”.
Ironically, it would turn out that Craig would, indeed, be found liable for a
little under half that amount following the resulting liquidation of DeMorgan
arising from his damaging behaviour. A $425,000 bankruptcy notice being
charged against Craig Wright in recovery actions sees him eventually settle
to avoid the inevitable in 2013.
DeMorgan's new shareholder, clearly smarting from having invested in a
business he’d not been given the full truthful picture of, only to see its board
members abandon ship one month later and set about damaging the value
of his investment further, took them to court, where they were found guilty
of a breach of contract and instructed to cease and desist from further
contact with the company's clients.
This is the part in the movie where a narrator would cut in with a wry, "Craig
Wright did not cease and desist from further contact with the company's
clients".
Fast forward to 2004 and Mr Ryan has now had Mr and Mrs Wright dragged
back into court for their nefarious activities in contravention of the original
court's judgement.
HEARING DATE(S): July 26, 2004, July 27, 2004, August 28, 2004
JUDGMENT DATE: August 31, 2004
The long and the short of this contempt of court case is that email records
from Craig's accounts, telephone logs from his mobile number, visitor sign-
in logs at DeMorgan client, ASX offices, as well as actual invoices he issued,
served to chart a damning record of numerous and persistent efforts by him
to secure business after he had left DeMorgan and after he had been told by
a court judgement to stop contacting its clients.
Craig’s attempted defence, a low-tech version of his oft-repeated mantra he
would come to rely on in the coming years, "It wasn’t me, I was hacked".
But the judge, like those who would follow in later years, saw through his
absurd excuses:
Subsequent sentencing demonstrated that judges do not take kindly to
defendants who brazenly lie to them and ignore their rulings, "In my view Mr
Wright’s deliberate flouting of his undertaking makes this a serious offence.
His lack of contrition exacerbates its seriousness. There is a need to bring
home to a contemnor the seriousness of his contempt. For the purposes of
the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999, s 5(2) these are my reasons
for my determining that a sentence of imprisonment is required in this case. I
propose to sentence Craig Wright to a term of imprisonment of 28 days.”
This sentence of 28 days imprisonment was suspended on condition that
Craig would perform 250 hours of community service, and he was ordered
to pay the costs of the proceedings.
In a subsequent 2005 appeal against this judgement, Craig did, in fact,
attempt to challenge one particular email amongst the overwhelming
evidence against him, citing a slew of claimed IP address differences and
disputed access to proxy servers as ‘proof’ it was not he who had sent it, in
desperate hope it would magically exonerate him in the face of all other
evidence and reason.
It did not.
Source: http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/nsw/NSWCA/2005/368.html
So, it is this record of dishonesty and desperate reliance on refusing to
recognise the validity of evidence which serves to expose his lies and fraud,
through his attempts to claim that 'it cannot be proven that somebody else
was not responsible for them’, namely, his "I was hacked" go-to, we will see
repeated again and again throughout his subsequent entanglement in the
following years with the ATO, the Kleiman case, the media and the wider
Bitcoin community as a whole.
Craig Wright obtained quite a few IT/Cybersecurity related certificates during his career.
From Craig’s current blog, we learn that he received a “golden handshake”,
by the end of 2008 from his employer BDO, which indicates he was not
leaving voluntarily.
“When I worked at BDO, I took the idea further, and was involved with the
development of computer-aided audit tools (CAATs). I was constantly
surprised by the level of fraud and corporate misappropriation within every
organisation I ever audited. Most issues were very small and added up to be
a material amount.
The launch of Bitcoin occurred when it did not as a response to the global
financial crisis but as I was offered a golden handshake and could leave in
December 2008 and start working on the project in 2009.”
Craig Wright worked at BDO from November 2004 till December 2008
In 2009, Craig raised two Australian companies:
Information Defense Pty Ltd (January 29, 2009)
Integyrs Pty Ltd (May 11, 2009)
UPDATE: From one of the damning ATO reports filed January 2022 (after
the Kleiman v Wright trial) we learn a few interesting tidbits about three of
the companies that Craig raised so far, being Ridges Estate, Information
Defense and Integyrs.
“many where the ATO has disallowed R&D claims and imposed penalties”
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/878/12/kleiman-v-wright/
Notably, visible at footnote 6, there’s a gap between 2004 and 2008. This
was the period that Craig Wright was employed by BDO and had abandoned
his R&D claims scheme, which he would pick up again after he left BDO in
December 2008. More about that later.
Now, it should be noted a 2019 article written by Murray Distributed
Technologies called “Forensic Report Raises Questions about Australian
Tax Office’s Handling of Craig Wright Probe” attempts to claim that
'exclusively obtained' correspondence from the ATO serves to refute those
who claim that Craig’s business history is predominantly centred around him
seemingly earning more from tax rebates than legitimate business
activities(1). Their attempted refutation involves citing correspondence from
the ATO to Craig Wright relating to an audit the ATO had conducted into
Craig’s tax filings for the 2008/2009 year, which also included two instances
of him claiming to have personally sold Intellectual Property to the above
two companies for $1,350,000 and $896,000 in September 2009 and
December 2009, respectively as capital disposals which, when offset
against a number of claimed deductions for that tax year, resulted in a net
capital gain of $34,713 for the tax year.
(1) while they cite a hand-wavy ‘many claims’, this charge actually originates
from the ATO’s very own findings:
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/3/kleiman-v-wright/
Interestingly, in a blog post Craig made very recently in his usual attempt to
‘set the record straight’ along the lines of his tried-and-trusted “what
people fail to understand is…” tangled web of obfuscation he likes to weave,
he himself addresses this first conflict with the ATO and claims it relates to
the sale of rights to the ‘Bitcoin database’ and related Bitcoin IP to these two
Australian companies he owned, through an “overseas company and
associated trust” as the seller and Info Defense and Integyrs as the buyers.
Yet the ATO, when referencing the content of the meeting they had with
Craig about this matter, state that he is claiming to have sold ‘Intellectual
Property’ in a personal capacity to these two business entities, hence the
capital disposal appearing on his 2008/2009 personal income tax filing that
they had flagged up for investigation. There was no ‘overseas company and
associated trust’ mentioned at all in this matter, meaning this is a
retrospective ‘amendment’ to the story Craig is now telling and is not
reflected in the supposed facts as presented in the ‘exclusively obtained’
documents Murray Distributed Technologies attempted to exonerate him
with:
Source: https://britevue.medium.com/forensic-report-raises-questions-about-australian-tax-offices-handling-of-
craig-wright-probe-138843251ef5
Remember, the issue was about Craig’s personal income tax, not an
overseas company and trust transaction, which is fully attested to in Craig’s
own response to the ATOs investigation at the time:
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/24/4/kleiman-v-wright/
These are his words specifically relating to the substantial total value of
those claimed personal IP transfer transactions, along with his additional
explanations concerning the nearly-as-substantial personal expense
deductions where he has claimed such things as a large amount of money
loaned from his wife to cover his conference attendances and education
expenses etc.
Murray Distributed Technologies describes the resultant personal tax liability
arising from that net capital gain, on which he would have had to pay an
amount of tax, as serving to prove that Craig was not, in fact, abusing the
Australian tax system for fun and profit.
Source: https://britevue.medium.com/forensic-report-raises-questions-about-australian-tax-offices-handling-of-
craig-wright-probe-138843251ef5
Except, of course, it isn’t that cut-and-dry and, certainly when it comes to
Craig Wright, we shall see that nothing ever is. For example, sure, he would
have had to pay some income tax on this net gain which, for the 2008/2009
tax year was calculated as per the following rates:
Which, as we can see, isn’t a particularly large amount of Australian dollars,
albeit we do concede that, for the tax year in question, Craig does not seem
to have warranted a tax rebate... personally. But, even though we can see
within the correspondence presented in the Murray Distributed
Technologies ar ticle that the ATO eventually relented and withdrew their
objection decision, they don’t quite tell the whole story clearly shown within
these facts, namely, of a very large amount of value assigned to this
'Intellectual Property' derived, according to Craig during his interview with
the ATO, from the previous ten years of University studies which, even
though it apparently did not seemingly warrant patenting, would have seen
these two, newly formed, business entities, reporting high-value costs
incurred for said purchases on their Business Activity Statements, the basis
by which rebates for GST (Australian Sales/VAT tax equivalent), R&D, et al
are calculated.
All Craig would have had to ensure is that there was a sufficient amount of
personal expenses he could offset against the apparent income he would
have received from these two companies in payment for these transactions,
in order to avoid being exposed to an excessively high personal tax liability
for that period. Which is exactly what he was able to do.
So now Craig is the proud owner of two Australian business entities which
are holders of intellectual property of significant value... as attested by the
sale by him to them... for the price he dictated.
All that’s needed is for a business owner to ensure that they make sure to
file for any GST and/or R&D rebates these business entities might now be
entitled to as a result of their expenditure on this Intellectual Property, right?
Indeed.
Craig Wright in China, December 2010
With that said, Craig raised three more companies in 2011:
Cloudcroft Pty Ltd (March 3, 2011)
Panopticrypt Pty Ltd (June 2, 2011)
Strasan Pty Ltd (July 21, 2011)
— renamed to C01n Pty Ltd (February 14, 2014)
Also important to keep in mind is that on February 14, 2011 W&K Info
Defense Research LLC is being raised by Dave Kleiman in Palm Beach
Gardens, Florida, USA. Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman tried to land four
cybersecurity related projects at Homeland Security in the USA, however,
that failed. Homeland Security did not intend to use the services of the two
men, and politely but firmly rejected all four of their proposals.
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/24/21/kleiman-v-wright/
None of these aforementioned companies, nor their activities, were Bitcoin
related, initially. But in later years, Craig would make them part of his (as we
will learn, empty) Bitcoin fraud empire.
January 1, 2011: Paper “Using Checklists To Make Better Best”.
Dated January 1, 2011, this paper written by Craig Wright and Tanveer A Zia,
kicks off Craig’s diary running from 2011 to February 2014. It is relevant in
that it frames the primary area of the industry sector Craig focused on for
these years: Information Technology and Cybersecurity.
February 4, 2011: Let’s introduce Craig’s blog “Cracked, inSecure and
Generally Broken”.
While Satoshi Nakamoto left the epoch-defining, revolutionary,
decentralised and trustless Bitcoin project to Gavin Andresen et al in
December 2010 and “moved on to other things”, Craig was merely
rehashing tired old ideas based on thoroughly non-revolutionary
technologies. On Craig’s personal blog we find him proposing an extremely
un-Satoshi-like ‘new revolution in payments’ idea.
“I am interested in talking with others who may be interested in starting an
online gold trading system alone [sic] the lines of a PayPal.”
On a related sidenote: it is not unlikely that the hearsay nothingburger
around Ira Kleiman testifying in Kleiman v Wright that during a Thanksgiving
dinner in 2009, Dave Kleiman had purportedly told his brother Ira that he,
Dave, was working with a ‘wealthy foreign man to develop digital currency
and that it would be bigger than Facebook’ is related to this clunky,
everything-but-revolutionary payments idea of Craig.
which brought us Bitcoin would move on to something as clunky and
unimaginative as an online-gold-trading-with-a-PayPal-rip-off a mere one-
and-half months after departing.
Craig will use his blog in the years 2014 and 2015 to drop (backdated) hints
and clues, some subtle, some quite obvious, about his self-declared
Satoshi-ness. A handful of these forgeries will be showcased later.
Talking about Craig Wright being interested in payment systems, there’s also
this video. Shot around the same era (in the video, largely shot at
Woolworths supermarkets, an promotional stand for the “Woolies Earn &
Learn” programme is visible, that started running in 2011), we see Craig
wearing a hoodie and using a “NFC payment glove”.
Wait, do we notice Craig Wright wearing a hoodie in this clip? Yes, we notice
Craig Wright wearing a hoodie in this clip.
On October 30, 2021, Craig would categorically deny such thing ever
happened.
July/August 2011: The Conversation comments
At the moment of writing, it is exactly 10 years ago that Craig Wright
apparently first learned about Bitcoin. In late July and early August 2011
Craig initially referenced Bitcoin, for what appears to be the first time in his
life, through comments he wrote on ‘The Conversation’ website. Examples
of which can still be found online:
Now let’s have a look at Satoshi Nakamoto’s writings. On no public forum
where he was active in the 2008–2010 era (Bitcoin Forum, P2P Foundation
forum, other message boards), did Satoshi ever spell:
BitCoin
Bit Coin
(Bit Coin)
bit coins
And remember, Satoshi wrote Bitcoin (or bitcoin) hundreds and hundreds of
times on these public forums!
However, to be fair, there is one known instance where Satoshi Nakamoto
wrote ‘BitCoin’. Hidden in the dungeons of early Bitcoin code releases, we
can find a readme file on SourceForge where he left this typo untouched for
a while in 2009.
Mockup of 2009 images clockwise: readme files, release notes, About page Bitcoin client, message board
Within the red box top left, a few snippets from the January/February 2009
readme files are shown, and the October 29, 2009 readme file when Bitcoin
changed from Alpha to Beta. Since this file, and the text within, is copied
forward to the next Bitcoin code release (and is mildly edited to reflect the
release version it supports), it can be considered a one time typo. On
November 4, 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto himself corrected this anomaly on
SourceForge.
So basically, not once did Craig Wright spell it in 2011 like Satoshi Nakamoto
did in public in 2008–2010. One exception is the hardly used readme files
with a ‘BitCoin’ typo. Making this finding even more remarkable is the fact
that Satoshi’s last known private correspondence with some of the main
Bitcoin developers at the time (Gavin Andresen, Martti Malmi and Mike
Hearn) is dated end of April 2011, which is just 3 months before Craig made
his public comments on the The Conversation website!
For example, Satoshi wrote on April 23, 2011 to Mike Hearn: “I’ve moved on
to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone. I do hope your
BitcoinJ continues to be developed into an alternative client.”.
Is this the reason why Craig Wright never mentions these online comments
on The Conversation website, as they clearly prove his non-Satoshi-ness?
One can make an educated guess.
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917
To recap, Satoshi Nakamoto always, without exception, wrote “Bitcoin” or
“bitcoin” on all public forums where he had an account, like the cypherpunk
mailing list on Metzdowd, P2P Foundation, SourceForge and the Bitcoin
Forum linked to the official Bitcoin website (since late 2009 a Simple
Machines Forum template, this whole template was moved to the Bitcointalk
domain in June 2011 with a simple DNS change). Also from private emails
with developers that have been revealed over the years, and we just showed
an example, we know that Satoshi Nakamoto always used the same spelling
for Bitcoin. And we only know of a ‘BitCoin’ typo in the 2009 SourceForge
readme files accompanying the Bitcoin source code releases.
On a related sidenote, in the December 10, 2010 post of Satoshi Nakamoto
shown above, a post that he wrote a few days before he left the public eye
forever, Satoshi also made clear that putting large amounts of arbitrary data
in the Bitcoin blockchain was not advisable, as that “doesn’t scale". And
Satoshi is right, it doesn’t scale, for example when it comes to verification
and propagation times.
Craig’s latest brainchild BSV, a remote derivative of the original Bitcoin
blockchain, which is by Satoshi Nakamoto’s original design only used as a
decentralized ledger for the bitcoin token, only remotely resembles
something Bitcoin. For example, BSV, which is factually a highly centralized
November 2018 minority fork of Bitcoin Cash (who split from Bitcoin in
August 2017), allows every type of data to be pumped into their blockchain,
against Satoshi Nakamoto’s explicit “Piling every proof-of-work quorum
system in the world into one dataset doesn’t scale” advice.
As BSV will likely find out longer term, presuming they will not collapse
earlier for other reasons, their blockchain will come to a grinding halt at
some point, as they listened to Satoshi Nakamoto pretender Craig Wright,
and not to the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
Let’s return to Craig Wright, the wannabe Satoshi Nakamoto.
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/83/24/kleiman-v-wright/
Email, taken from a much longer thread of emails, from Craig Wright to Ira
Kleiman, April 23, 2014. Although the email is loaded with lies, the era that
Craig mentions here as being where he started his Bitcoin business journey
(without Dave Kleiman, of course) appears truthful, as it will be confirmed by
another source: Jamie Wilson, Craig’s CFO in 2013 who was deposed in the
Kleiman v Wright lawsuit on November 8, 2019.
2012, The silence before the storm
After August 2011, Craig Wright did not mention Bitcoin in public ever again
as far as we know now. However, from aforementioned deposition of Jamie
Wilson in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, we learned that somewhere late
2012, early 2013 Craig was trying to set up a Bitcoin related business, a
Bitcoin Banking System according the 2013 design document.
SQL database? Huh?
It can be logically concluded that after casually mentioning Bitcoin a few
times on The Conversation website, Craig had started to study the Bitcoin
subject, and it is probably fair to say that his Bitcoin related business plans
have an initial appearance of being legit. However, as it turned out, the
Bitcoin Banking System would only be used as a series of Potemkin Village
building blocks for a massive Australian tax fraud in which Craig tried to
obtain tens of millions in GST, Income Tax returns and R&D tax rebates. As
we will discover, Craig’s Modus Operandi will be to cover every call out with
a new, more brazen, lie or forgery, until the inevitable next implosion.
Craig Wright knows a few things about “metadata”, he shows on his blog on July 21, 2012
After meeting Jamie Wilson somewhere late 2011 or early 2012, and first
helping Jamie with his business called CryptoLoc/YourDocumentFile, it
appears Craig Wright had been discussing some of his Bitcoin related
business ideas with Jamie too over the course of (late) 2012. Which lead to
Jamie turning around to start working for Craig’s startup endeavor.
The only other notable events happening in 2012 are the formalization of
Craig’s divorce from his wife Lynn Black and the dissolution of W&K Info
Defense Research LLC on September 28, 2012. The company was dissolved
by default Administrative Dissolution because Dave Kleiman did not file an
Annual Report for 2011, most likely because he had no further use for the
business after their four proposed projects were rejected by Homeland
Security, which had been the sole purpose for the incorporation of the LLC
in the first place. It would not be reinstated again until after his death.
Don’t let “2012” fool you: this forgery was created early 2014 after Craig actually bought these 2 UK companies
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/2/kleiman-v-wright/
These type of forgeries showcase the extreme lengths Craig Wright is willing
to go to deceive his audience in and outside the courts of law.
January 8, 2013: Craig hires Jamie Wilson.
As said, Craig Wright teamed up with Jamie Wilson, who would be hired as
CFO to help Craig set up his business endeavors. However, Jamie would not
stay long in that position, as he eventually realised that Craig was executing
a multi-million-dollar fraud over the course of 2013. More about that later.
Jamie Wilson recalls:
“Q: And you started in August of 2013, right?
A: No, no. I didn’t. If you have a look it was January, 8 of January, 2013. So
that Christmas party that we asked before —
Q: Hold on, go ahead.
A: That would have been in December. So that does work out.
Q: So, the date on this, this goes, the date then the month then the year?
A: Yes.
Q: So, why is your resignation say here then November, 2013, if you resigned
in October?
A: That would have been Craig or who, or his bookkeeper who looked after
the accounts. I would not have processed my own termination pay because I
never received the payment.
Q: Okay. But you were scheduled to be one of the highest employees, paid
employees of this company, correct?
A: Yes.
Q: So, it is January, you are saying that you were employed January 8th of
2013.
A: Yes.
Q: And how many people started the company, well I guess with you?
A: Well Ramona Watts. His wife. Myself and Craig.
Q: Okay.
A: And then I would live in Brisbane; Craig lives in Sydney. All of the business
was done out of Sydney. I was flying back and forward. Craig was then on-
boarding other people around him to start up Hotwire PE.
Q: Okay. So, for nine months — strike that. So in April Dave dies?
A: Yes.
Q: You stay on with Hotwire in May, right?
A: Yes.
Q: You stay on in June, right? You stay on in July. You stay on all of the way
until October or November?
A: 23rd of October my resignation.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson
February 11, 2013: Craig wins administrative appeal against ATO.
Since Craig Wright produces forgeries by the boatloads, and then some, we
are always sceptical when new material supporting Craig’s case ‘leaks’. But,
as we explained earlier, when it comes to fakes and forgeries being exposed
by investigators, it is always ‘I didn’t do that, I was hacked’ or, in this
particular case with the ATO, ‘You were hacked, here’s where your network
has vulnerabilities, let’s focus on those instead of my fraudulent rebate
claims’.
Let’s presume for the moment though that the screenshots below are
genuine. They come from the same February 18, 2019 article by Murray
Distributed Technologies, discussed earlier. They try to claim that Craig
Wright had been fighting with the ATO since 2009, furthering his ‘the ATO
knew about my Bitcoin since 2009’ lie and, in a peculiar case of ‘the dog ate
YOUR homework’, asserts the ATO was relying on evidence forged by
themselves or a third-party, as a result of the ‘forensically proven’ network
vulnerability, in order to discredit Craig. In Part 2 of this series we will see
ATO coming back to these accusations.
Note that the Murray Distributed Technologies article was written before the
full ATO reports became known, as these reports were only filed in the
Kleiman v Wright lawsuit in June 2020. The ATO reports will be quoted a lot
in this article, and, unsurprisingly, they contain a full debunk of Craig’s
‘forensic evidence’.
Source: https://britevue.medium.com/forensic-report-raises-questions-about-australian-tax-offices-handling-of-
craig-wright-probe-138843251ef5
It is in our opinion not a stretch to presume that this ‘win’ against the ATO’s
attempted objections concerning his personal ‘Intellectual Property’ sale
scheme which, by his own recent words asserting that GST was paid ‘on
both sides’, would have netted him the opportunity to file for a not-
insubstantial rebate, in early 2013 may have emboldened Craig Wright to
think that he could push the tax authorities in Australia much more,
especially when it comes to ramping up the number of ‘events’ that never
happened, and at the same time substantially ramping up the monetary
valuation of these ‘events’.
April 2013
Let’s move forward to April 2013, a pivotal month in Craig Wright’s Bitcoin
fraud career. No less than three notable events happened in the second half
of April 2013.
The Coin-Exch Pty Ltd company was raised in Australia, the first of a
series of Bitcoin fraud related companies that, together with a few
companies that Craig raised in 2009 and 2011, would form the Hotwire
Group of companies.
Craig Wright bought his first few handfuls of Bitcoin on Mt Gox. This is,
as far as we know, the first time Craig actually touched Bitcoin. But just
like the The Conversation comments, Craig never talks about this
moment in his life. Telling?
Dave Kleiman, his once-partner in the short-lived and failed 2011
business endeavor called W&K Info Defense Research LLC in the USA,
passed away.
At first glance, these three events appear unrelated to each other, but in the
following 12 months we will learn how they intertwine nevertheless. First,
let’s break down the month of April 2013 day by day.
April 17, 2013: Craig raises Coin-Exch Ltd Pty in Australia.
April 22, 2013: Craig buys 42.3 BTC on Mt Gox.
April 24, 2013: Craig, on balance, sells 27.6 BTC on Mt Gox.
Craig Wright really started testing MtGox this day. He is using the withdraw
functionality twice for 1.8 BTC each, he buys 10 BTC, he sells a lot more, and
he deposits 0.57 BTC back into his Mt Gox wallet on this same day.
April 25, 2013: Craig buys 18 BTC on Mt Gox.
April 26, 2013: Dave Kleiman passes away.
“About two weeks before his grisly death, there was a change in Dave
Kleiman. The formerly generous and lively computer forensics expert
became confrontational and bitter. Around that time, Kleiman left the
Veteran’s Affairs hospital where he’d been a patient, and called his close
friend and business partner Patrick Paige to let him know. “They’ve decided
to release you? That’s great,” Paige remembers asking.
“No,” Kleiman responded. “I told the doctors to go fuck themselves.””
Snippet from a great piece from Gizmodo: “The Strange Life and Death of
Dave Kleiman, A Computer Genius Linked to Bitcoin’s Origins”
April 27, 2013: Craig buys 25.5 BTC on Mt Gox.
April 27, 2013: Craig publishes his first blog post about Bitcoin “A diatribe
on Bitcoin”.
A revealing part of Craig Wright’s first Bitcoin post: “I’ve placed my bet”.
Snippet from “A diatribe on Bitcoin”.
April 27, 2013: Craig publishes his second blog post about Bitcoin “Is
hording really an issue with bitcoin?”.
April 28, 2013: Craig publishes his third blog post about Bitcoin “Why
Bitcoins?”.
April 29, 2013: Craig publishes his fourth blog post about Bitcoin “Is
Bitcoin volatile?”.
Because these four blog posts about Bitcoin in April 2013, after Craig Wright
got redpilled on Mt Gox owning his first Bitcoins ever, reveal a lot about
Craig’s mood and status with Bitcoin at that specific moment in time, he has
(again) never mentioned these posts in public. Like his first noob comments
on Bitcoin in July/August 2011, Craig clearly doesn’t want you to know that
these early Bitcoin scribblings from his hand exist.
April 30, 2013: Craig receives message that Dave Kleiman has passed
away.
April 30, 2013: Craig posts video “Dave Kleiman — RIP (1967–2013)” on
YouTube.
Above is a link to the original video on Craig Wright’s YouTube account,
however, only available on WayBack Machine as Craig had deleted his
YouTube videos at some point. Below is a copy of this same video, uploaded
in 2018 by YouTube user Crypto Me!, still available on YouTube.
And again we have found another public outing that Craig Wright never
refers to in his conversations. Because, notably, and knowing what will come
next (Craig creating an impressive amount of backdated emails, fake
contracts and other forged digital documents, retroactively linking himself
and Dave Kleiman to the early days of Bitcoin), in this video Craig doesn’t
mention Bitcoin even once, let alone his supposed “partnership” with Dave
Kleiman in creating Bitcoin.
Under Craig Wright’s original YouTube video on WayBack Machine we can
find the comment below (posted May 8, 2013), with a reply from Craig
himself on the same day. Kursten (Merie) Karr is now one of the Fact
Witnesses in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, and she is likely to make an
appearance in November 2021 during the Jury Trial.
Kursten, who knew Dave Kleiman intimately since 1998 till he died in April
2013, is known to have stated:
“During the whole time I knew David [= Dave Kleiman], he never mentioned
or spoke to me about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. […] David never described
Craig Wright as his business partner or mentioned that they had business
interests together.”
April 30, 2013: Craig posts an In Memoriam about Dave Kleiman on his
blog, simply called “Dave Kleiman”.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20151123050253/http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com/2013/04/dave-
kleiman.html
While, sure, apologists for Craig Wright will claim that all of the above could
be explained away as exceptionally good OpSec, intentionally devised to
maintain distance between himself and any connection to Satoshi. What
they can’t explain however is why NONE of the myriad of forged
documents and false emails, backdated contracts and conflicting
statements which Craig would later try to pass off as evidence of him being
Satoshi Nakamoto, withstands even basic scrutiny.
Now, let’s circle back for a moment to Arthur van Pelt’s previous article
(which could be seen as the sequel to this series of two articles) “The Craig
Wright May 2016 Signing Sessions Debacle, In Full Context”. T hos e of
you who read that epistle about another noteworthy timeframe in the
Faketoshi saga (May 2015 — May 2016), might remember the following quote
that was penned down:
“On a related sidenote, while talking about or examining Craig Wright’s
forgeries, a list that has grown into the hundreds if not thousands by
now, there is a rule of thumb that never fails so far.
This rule of thumb is:
Everything Craig Wright and Bitcoin dated before April 2013 is a
forgery created after April 2013 (except for a handful of public
comments online in July/August 2011 when Craig apparently had just
learned about Bitcoin).”
And indeed, we have now arrived at the end of this, as said, pivotal month in
Craig Wright’s Bitcoin fraud career. What follows is something we can touch
upon somewhat indirectly, and only make educated guesses about. But fact
is, “something changed", something that made Craig feel confident enough
to unleash a massive tax fraud with Bitcoin as a scam tool, and during which
he slowly started to roleplay Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. This
roleplay, called out numerous times by a plethora of experts in all kinds of
linguistic, technical, legal and social fields, unfortunately lasts till today. It is
fair to say, we guess, that Craig Wright still needs to meet his master, most
likely in one of the impressive amount of lawsuits he’s currently involved
with.
It appears that the death of his former friend, combined with the fact that he
owned his first Bitcoin in the same period, had clearly sparked an illicit idea
for a Bitcoin scheme in Craig Wright — a scheme he believed would net him
millions of dollars in R&D tax rebates and other refunds from AusIndustry
and the Australian Taxation Office. But, first, he would need to craft a basis
through which he could claim the group of Australian companies he’d
incorporated had been funded for this supposed R&D expenditure in the
first place, namely, he could resurrect the US based company Dave Kleiman
had incorporated for their failed Homeland Security project pitches a couple
of years earlier, assert that it had held extremely valuable Intellectual
Property derived from millions of dollars in funding that he had personally
loaned it, and then file a legal claim for ‘return’ of said valuable investments
and assets. We will learn, of course, that said investments and assets never
existed in the first place.
With Dave Kleiman dead there would be nobody to dispute his wild claims
and with his burgeoning interest in Bitcoin, Craig Wright would have known
exactly how to get around the fact there would be no bank records of actual
cash having been paid to W&K Info Defense Research LLC. Thus began
Craig’s practice of claiming ownership, without any evidence, of large
amounts of Bitcoin, by simply searching the Bitcoin blockchain for suitable
transactions and public addresses to fit the needs of his fraudulent
enterprise.
May 3, 2013: Craig withdraws 43.9 BTC from Mt Gox.
June 2, 2013: Craig raises Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence Ltd Pty in
Australia.
Jamie Wilson recalls:
“Q: Can you talk to me about the type of intellectual property Craig was
developing in 2013?
A: So, we set up Hotwire PE and it was all about setting up a banking
platform, working with Rubik out of Sydney. The challenges were that it went
to a decimal six spaces instead of what we have today being four. So
unfortunately it couldn’t go ahead. At the time of October, so we started that
around about June/July of 2013. And by October I actually had finished and
resigned. All projects were related to Bitcoin, also setting up exchanges.
Q: Okay. So, was Craig involved in Bitcoin related intellectual property
development in 2013?
A: Yes.”
June 26, 2013: Craig emails Jamie all the 2011 W&K projects info.
Remember, not one of these US Department of Homeland Security projects
they pitched were Bitcoin related. DHS rejected all four of them and
absolutely did not hire Craig Wright or Dave Kleiman, or fund them or the US
business entity they had incorporated for the purpose, ‘W&K Info Defense
Research LLC’. Craig, however, now begins his re-writing of their shared
history to suit his new plans following Dave’s death.
June/July 2013: Craig changes his hoodies for fancy suits.
After Dave’s passing, a remarkable change is visible in Craig Wright’s
appearance. Jamie Wilson describes what happened.
“Q: Did you notice a change in Craig from before and after Dave died?
A: Yes.
Q: Okay. Can you expand on what that change was?
A: The change was from Craig, as I stated before, being a developer,
security, hoodie, you know, very much —
Q: Sorry.
A: You know, wearing hoodies and things like that, when I would have
meetings down in Sydney, he would turn up and we’d go to a little cafe shop
and things like that where the train station was. Once Dave had passed away
and things started to get kicked off with these new companies, there was a
matter of all of a sudden he had to dress in flash suits, you know, wear the
best watches, shoes, fascination with socks. Even down to vehicles. He
moved from his normal Subaru which was beaten up and went and got a
brand new car. It was just a massive change in lifestyle. It wasn’t the Craig I
originally met.
Q: So, I want to drill down on that a little bit more. Before Dave died you said
Craig dressed in hoodies?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you expand a little bit more?
A: Yes, tee shirts, normal sort of developer sort of clothes. You could tell — I
mean Craig is a very bright, very smart man.
Q: Right.
A: As I have said before, one of the greater futurists I have actually come
across. But it was just disappointing to see the way the business was
handled moving forward. And his arrogance, believing that he has got to
change himself, I think just caused him a lot of problems.
Q: Beyond the physical change of going from hoodies to suits and expensive
watches, did you see a change in his attitude at all?
A: Yes.
Q: Did he suddenly have confidence? What was the change?
A: Oh, the confidence went through the roof. It was a matter of I’m the man,
I’m going to do this, this is the way I’m going to go about it. Whereas a lot
more humble prior to Dave’s passing.
Q: And, how quickly after Dave’s passing did this happen?
A: I would have said June/July.
Q: Did you understand, did you ever come to have an understanding of why
there was this sudden shift in his personality? Did it have to do with money
or any, I mean, tell me, did you see any — strike that. Did you ever come to
have an understanding of why there was a sudden, a massive shift in Craig’s
outward appearance?
A: No.
Q: Okay.
A: It was only when time has gone by.
Q: Beyond flashy watches, suits, new cars, did you see any other sudden
displays of wealth?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you expand on that?
A: I did have a Christmas party and Craig and Ramona joined us at the event
that night. I mean, Craig was very much, you know, the best of the
Champagne, top shelf, and out of a team of around about ten, there was
about $15,000 spent on the evening, all paid by Craig.
Q: Was that something Craig would have done prior? Is that something you
had seen Craig do prior to Dave’s death?
A: No, absolutely not. I mean, prior to Dave’s passing, I was the one buying
the coffees and spending the money travelling back and forward.
Q: And then thereafter?
A: It was a matter of he would even fly his team up to Brisbane. We would all
go out together. Craig would actually pay for everyone who came along.
Q: Did it appear to you that after Dave died, Craig had access to massive
amounts of assets that he did not previously have before?
A: The money came from somewhere.
Q: Sorry, go ahead?
A: I believe that there was a change, and overnight he had a lot of wealth.
Q: Okay.
A: But, at the same time I know that he was in the very early stages of Bitcoin
as well.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
Now where did this “overnight wealth" in June/July 2013 came from?
Perhaps we can find an answer to that, knowing Craig Wright would be in
the business of claiming massive tax returns in the upcoming years. When
did Craig start receiving these tax refunds?
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/3/kleiman-v-wright/
In one of their reports issued in 2014, the ATO provides an unambiguous
hint, looking at the screenshot above, it suggests where Craig’s sudden
wealth halfway through 2013 might have originated from.
“For the past 2 years […] 94% of your income or money to which you have
access is comprised of GST or income tax refunds.”
Another clue is coming from a July 2, 2013 email from Craig Wright to Jamie
Wilson, where they discuss the very early days of Hotwire, the NSW
Supreme Court fraud, bookkeeping matters and…
“have done the initial GST […] processed and accepted by the ATO”.
It appears Craig had just prepared, and lodged, the first GST BAS refund for
his new company ‘group’ headed by Hotwire PE, derived from the ‘valuable’
Intellectual Property he’d ‘recovered’ from W&K Info Defense. This
Intellectual Property, remember, is not Bitcoin related but he has managed
to convince Jamie Wilson that it is related to his ‘Bitcoin Banking System’
scheme.
On the same day, Craig Wright sends an email to his wife (with CC to Jamie
Wilson), indicating that he is already thinking about spending “that money”…
All in all, it is not unlikely that the first (fraudulent) GST returns started to
come in in the course of July 2013. In this case we have to presume that
Craig Wright indeed lodged his first GST BAS on July 1, 2013 as he indicated
in his email to Jamie Wilson on July 2, 2013. Since the ATO takes 12 days
max to process GST BAS returns, and advises up to 5 days extra before
refunds appear on the taxpayer’s bank account, then consequently Craig
started to notice, to his pleasure, that his tax fraud appeared to be working
as planned well before the end of the month of July 2013.
Lastly, what might have lifted his spirits also around this time was in narrowly
avoiding bankruptcy in the aftermath of the 2003 — 2006 Ryan v Wright
case, in which Craig was “chased through the courts” since 2006 by Mr
McArdle.
Unknown in which month exactly, but in 2013 Wright settled the $425,000
bankruptcy notice with McArdle [with the first tax refunds maybe?],
according to the December 11, 2015 The Australian — Business Review
section — article below. And is it a stretch to suggest that this ‘Sword of
Damocles’ hanging above Craig’s head since 2006 might have pressed him
into thinking harder and harder of questionably legal, or outright criminal,
ways to get rid of this debt?
In any event, the evidence shows that his tax refund schemes were certainly
serving as remarkable income streams and disproportionate to any
legitimate business activity his companies may have conducted, it certainly
appears to have provided for a sufficiently large amount of disposable
income, that he was finally able to meet his long-standing legal obligation to
his DeMorgan debt.
July 1, 2013: Craig admits backdating invoices to July 1, 2013.
A rare occassion where Craig Wright admitted he wasn’t hacked, or where
ex-staff or Greg Maxwell or Ira Kleiman or Anonymous (or whoever suits the
occasion) altered his documents. Obviously this backdating by Craig
“against Jamie Wilson’s advice” happened a bit later. But to understand the
magnitude of Craig’s Potemkin Village early on:
Tens of millions are created from thin air (as ATO would find out) by
making up fake invoices. Some of these invoices would be addressed to
DeMorgan (not to be confused with another DeMorgan company discus
sed earlier), a company that didn’t even exist yet.
When the issuing company claims to have incurred deductible ‘costs’
(again created from thin air, as the ATO would also discover), then they
reduce or entirely eliminate their tax liability from the income derived
from the invoices issued.
The receiving companies (also owned or otherwise controlled by Craig
Wright) who will have no, or hardly any, income revenue, now have
$9,619,869.29 GST in total to claim back as GST BAS refunds derived
from the sales tax they claim they paid on those invoices.
To give this fraudulent construction the appearance of legitimacy, Craig
would start hiring staff, supposed to be paid from the first tax returns,
hence the backdating needed to receive these GST BAS refunds as
soon as possible.
Rinse, and repeat. The tax fraud set up is born.
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/3/kleiman-v-wright/
July 18, 2013: Craig sends email to ATO with ‘evidence’ of his Bitcoin
holdings.
This is Wilson Exhibit 11 from the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Let’s have a look
at how this email was discussed in court.
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I’m handing you what has been marked as Wilson 11. It was
produced in this litigation as Defense 30127. Do you recognize this e-mail as
an e-mail Craig sent to — with a cc: to you?
A: Yes.
Q: It is also sent to Mr. Dempster at the ATO?
A: Yes.
Q: And the subject is Evidence?
A: Yes.
Q: And in it there is a listing of companies, a Coin Exchange and CSW
Personal?
A: Yes.
Q: With the Bitcoin holdings of 438,000 and 57,000?
A: Yes.
Q: The value of those Bitcoin on Mt. Gox which totals to 53.8 million.
A: Correct.
Q: Okay. And then, “My wallet is listed below.” Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you take this e-mail to — did you take this e-mail to tell you that —
sorry, strike that. Did you understand from this e-mail that Craig owned and
controlled over $53 million worth of Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: In fact, close to 500,000 Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you remember receiving this e-mail?
A: Yes.
Q. Did you ever talk to Craig about this e-mail?
A: It was ongoing conversations.
Q: Okay. All consistent with the story that, what?
A: All of these Bitcoin holdings.
Q: Okay. Did he ever tell you that this Bitcoin was locked in an inaccessible
file to him?
A: No.
Q: Thank you, Mr. Wilson. So I can stop asking the question a million times,
Mr. Wilson, did Craig ever tell you that Bitcoin he owned or controlled was
locked in a file that he could not access?
A: No.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
Note that Craig Wright now claims to personally own and control 57,000
Bitcoin ‘not locked in a file’. Now let’s go back to April and May 2013, the
only times so far, at this point in time, that Craig had traded a bit on Mt Gox.
What we notice: at no point did Craig ever have more than some 50 Bitcoin
in that timeframe! So that number 57,000 is made up, just like the number
438,857 for Coin-Exch, of course.
Another reason we know that these numbers have been made up, and Craig
Wright never controlled a single Bitcoin of them, is the fact that he,
apparently in support of his email, created two Bitcoin Wallet screenshot
forgeries with transactions that never happened on the Bitcoin blockchain,
according the BlockChair explorer.
Source wallet screenshots: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/878/12/kleiman-v-wright/
Based on these forged images we can make an educated guess about one
of the addresses, namely 1eHhgW6vquBYhwMPhQ668HPjxTtpvZGPC, that
Craig Wright took from the Bitcoin rich list, and used to create these
forgeries. The 1eHhg address never had one transaction on July 18, 2011,
but as it happens, the total transacted on that address (474,320.43 BTC) is
exactly what Craig claims happened in one transaction in his 2011 wallet
forgery!
However… Oops.
“That address was confirmed to be a MtGox address by Mark Karpeles
moving 424,242.42424242 on June 23, 2011. Absolutely zero to do with
CSW.” — Twitter user Jingles
Source: https://twitter.com/JinglesBTC/status/1488939366030647296
We will soon learn more of these Bitcoin rich list addresses that Craig
randomly picked and used in his scammery. Keep reading…
The $57 million NSW Supreme Court fraud kicks off
We’ve now entered the phase where Craig Wright really starts executing on
his fraudulent Bitcoin scheme that would continue with a Satoshi Nakamoto
cosplay starting some six months later.
July 25, 2013: Craig files the first of two fraudulent claims of $28 million
against W&K Info Defense Research LLC at the New South Wales Supreme
Court.
And here we find Craig Wright unleash the most outrageous nonsense over
the dead body of his ‘friend’ Dave Kleiman. The following screenshot is an
exemplar of how the rest of the Faketoshi saga, a fascinating fairy tale of
epic proportions, will unfold.
There were never “contract labour services”.
Craig Wright never loaned money to Dave Kleiman.
There was never a “contract dated 27 October 2008”.
It goes on and on like this in the filing. It is sad and disturbing to realize how
readily Craig Wright is rewriting and exploiting a dead person’s reputation
for his own financial benefits. And this will not remain the only time either in
this timeframe, unfortunately. In Part 2 we will meet another dead person
that is also being actively exploited after he passed away: Professor David
Rees.
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/24/11/kleiman-v-wright/
August 1, 2013: “a W&K shareholders meeting was called”.
This event is mentioned in an Affidavit that Craig Wright filed at the NSW
Supreme Court early November 2013 to support his $57 million in claims
case against W&K Info Defense Research LLC. Let’s unravel the dirty trick
that Craig is executing here.
Craig Wright is falsely claiming he is 50% shareholder of W&K. In
reality, Dave Kleiman always had been 100% shareholder.
The shareholders meeting was not about W&K but about Hotwire (but,
as Jamie Wilson recalls, some matters around W&K were indeed
discussed).
Jamie Wilson, without his consent as he had resigned already by
November 2013, was retroactively made Director of W&K by Craig
Wright.
Unbeknownst to Jamie Wilson, who no longer worked for or with Craig
at this point, he is the person Craig claims ‘approves’ the winding down
of W&K and the acceptance of the debt positions (the $57 million in
contrived IP that Craig was needing to magic up for his Australia-based
tax rebate fraud).
And indeed, Jamie Wilson was not aware this had all happened in this
capacity, as he declared under oath to Ira Kleiman’s head lawyer Vel
Freedman during his deposition on November 8, 2019:
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I’m handing you what has been marked as Wilson 14. It is
Document 83–4. If you open that up Mr. Wilson and take a look, do you
recognize this as an affidavit Craig Wright submitted to the Supreme Court
of New South Wales?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you turn to Paragraph 23?
A: Yes.
Q: In it Craig writes, “On first of August 2013 a shareholders meeting was
called for W&K Info Defense LLC to be held on the 16th of August 2013. “The
meeting was e-mailed to the company address as well as sent to the
address of the shareholders and company.” “The shareholding of W&K Info
Defense LLC was Craig S. Wright 50 percent; David A. Kleiman 50 percent.”
And in Paragraph 24, “The meeting from Point 23, the meeting was held on
the 16th of August 2013. “The following people were present. Jamie Wilson,
Craig S. Wright.” Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: Did this meeting ever occur?
A: Yes.
Q: What happened at that meeting?
A: Craig said to me that with David’s passing that we needed to do the
paperwork for him to turn around and take full control and resolve the issue
of David being on the, as a shareholder. To be honest, at that stage I had no,
I didn’t have the knowledge or understanding of what it all meant, because
the motions were already happening with the Supreme Court of New South
Wales.
Q: So, if you look at the next page, “The following points were moved at the
meeting: “One, Jamie Wilson will act as a director for purposes of consenting
to orders and the company to be wound down. The vote was Craig Wright
yes; no other parties. It was agreed that filing the motion to accept the debt
owned by company W&K Info Defense LLC would be closed.” Do you recall
this happening?
A: This is my first knowledge that I was acting as a director of the U.S.
company.
Q: So, this is the first time — so, let me break that down a little bit. You do
recall the meeting happening; is that correct?
A: It was part of our meeting that day and it was around Hotwire PE.
Q: Okay.
A: Not so much W&K.
Q: So, you remember the meeting happening. Is it accurate to say that you
remember the meeting happening, but you don’t remember being made a
director of W&K?
A: Absolutely.
Q: Okay. So then you would agree with the characterization in 24, Paragraph
24 that there was a meeting. Present, Jamie Wilson and Craig S. Wright were
there?
A: Yes.
Q: But is it accurate to say you would disagree with what happened in
Paragraph 26?
A: Yes. This is my first that I am being made aware that I was a director of the
LLC company.”
“Q: Mr. Wilson, can you take a look at Plaintiffs' Exhibit 1 for me, or Wilson 1
for me. And, those are the resignation letters?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you read the companies you resigned from?
A: Coin Exchange, Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence, Interconnect Research
and Integers.
Q: I noticed that, and actually you noticed, Mr. Wilson, during a break you
mentioned this to us, that there was missing, W&K was missing from the
resignation.
A: That’s correct.
Q: Why is that?
A: Because I didn’t even know I was a director.
MR. FREEDMAN: No further questions.
MR. PASCHAL: No further questions. All right, I think we are done.”
Ultimately, this fraudulent set up by Craig Wright of a line of events that had
never happened — followed by boatloads of other lies, false promises and
meanwhile providing more forgeries to the Kleiman estate in the course of
2014 to 2017 by Craig — in his desperate attempt to claim the title of
Satoshi so he could convince a, now extremely sceptical ATO, that he did,
indeed, own hundreds and hundreds of thousands of BTC, will lead to Ira
Kleiman, brother and heir of the deceased Dave Kleiman, igniting a multi-
billion fraud lawsuit against Craig Wright in February 2018. At the moment of
writing, this case is still running, with jury trial to be expected in November
2021.
August 11, 2013: Jamie Wilson emails a business status overview.
At first glance, this all appears pretty legit. If only the way of funding was
legit too… But Jamie Wilson makes one thing clear about this email. What’s
the common theme, Jamie?
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I’m handing you what has been marked as Wilson 15. It was
produced in this litigation as Defense 43726. Take a moment. Do you
recognize this as an e-mail you sent to Craig and Ramona Watts?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you explain to me what this e-mail is?
A: These were all of the projects that Craig wanted to work on. 5/5, Hotwire
and the increase in staff in a short period of time.
Q: So, these were all intellectual property projects?
A: Yes.
Q: And they all related to Bitcoin? What did they relate to? What did all of the
projects relate to — strike that. Was there a common theme between all of
these projects?
A: Yes.
Q: What was the common theme between all of the intellectual property
projects that Hotwire was working on?
A: It was Bitcoin.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8,
2019)
August 12, 2013: Craig raises Integyrz Pty Ltd in Australia. An ever-so-
slightly different spelling of a previously incorporated company of his,
‘Integyrs’.
August 13, 2013: Craig files the second fraudulent claim of almost $29
million against W&K Info Defense Research LLC at the New South Wales
Supreme Court.
The two false claims against W&K now total almost $57 million. Meanwhile,
more lies and nonsense is added to the list:
Craig Wright loaned Bitcoin to Dave Kleiman. Never happened.
Software and SDK (Software Development Kit) development. Another
false claim. Never happened.
We notice a contract being mentioned, dated January 8, 2009, that
never could have existed.
And we find Craig’s signature spelling mistakes, identifiers of his
sloppiness (“to the defendant to the defendant”).
We’re sure the reader now, while only looking at the tip of an immense fraud
iceberg, gets a feeling for why Ira Kleiman, the brother of the deceased Dave
Kleiman, was not amused anymore at some point, and decided to drag Craig
into court early 2018 for all this fraud because, after all, if Craig was Satoshi
and, as he’d previously claimed in his initial emails to the Kleiman estate, had
developed Bitcoin with Dave, even sharing mining rewards which would now
be worth fantastically large amounts of money, it was apparent that Craig
may be subsequently guilty of robbing the estate of their rightful Bitcoin and
IP!
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/24/11/kleiman-v-wright/
August 23, 2013: Craig raises W&K Company Pty Ltd in Australia.
This appears to have been done in support of his scheme to obtain the non-
existing Intellectual Property of W&K Info Defense Research LLC. In the end,
Craig Wright didn’t need this Australian company and never used it for
anything, as far as we know.
August 25, 2013: Craig raises Interconnected Research Pty Ltd in Australia.
August 26, 2013: Craig raises another four companies in Australia.
Pholus Pty Ltd
Denariuz Pty Ltd
Zuhl Pty Ltd
The Trustee for the Wright Family Trust
By now, the foundation has been laid for the Hotwire group of companies,
that Craig will use to attempt to defraud AusIndustry and ATO for millions of
multiple types of tax rebates for projects that only existed on paper. We will
learn that Craig’s original ideas around the “Bitcoin Banking System” have
been pulled apart and are spread over the several entities that Craig had
raised in the course of 2013. The common theme is, as we learned from
Jamie Wilson earlier: Bitcoin.
September 15, 2013: Craig announces the Hotwire Group on his blog.
crippled link to Satoshi Nakamoto, as Satoshi started development of Bitcoin
in 2007, while Craig indeed raised Information Defense in 2009 as the
reader might remember, a company that Craig apparently incorporates in
the Hotwire group at this point in time) and “In the next nine months, secrets
will start to come out.”, Craig is apparently slowly preparing the world for his
Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay. However, we will learn that the world, to Craig’s
frustration, didn’t pay attention too much to this cosplay for at least two
years from here…
September 20, 2013: Email from Jamie Wilson to Craig Wright.
The screenshot of this email is added to this article as an example of how
Craig was setting up his multi-million tax fraud. It appears that around this
time, Craig “I am adding BTC as inventory for now” Wright had been
researching the Bitcoin blockchain for public addresses with large,
sometimes dormant, holdings already.
Also, have a look at the numbers being discussed. Amount paid totals to shy
of $78.5 million.
September 23, 2013: Craig claims to control a little over 1 million Bitcoin.
And notable, at this point in time, these “little over 1 million Bitcoin” (which
were allegedly the mined Bitcoin, we will learn during an ATO hearing on
February 26, 2014 in Part 2) are not locked away in inaccessible, encrypted,
multi-layered Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme files send to offshore
Panamanian, sorry UK, sorry Singapore, sorry Seychelles it is, trusts with
Craig Wright as beneficiary, sorry, not beneficiary it is, and about a dozen “I
am lawyer” trustees who forgot that Dave Kleiman told them they had to
send bonded couriers with one, no five, no seven, no seventeen, whatever,
we lost count how many encrypted key slices in January 2020.
Instead, Craig had “control” over them. Interesting.
Which is also confirmed by another source. Because, what did Jamie Wilson
tell Vel Freedman during his deposition on November 8, 2019?
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I am handing you what has been marked as defense, sorry, as
Wilson Exhibit 10. It was produced in this litigation as Defense Australia
113043. If you take a look, do you see the e-mail at the top of the page, this
is a — do you recognize this as an e-mail that Craig sent to you?
A: Yes.
Q: It also went to Roger Manu of Rubik?
A: Correct.
Q: In it Craig says, “XBT Bitcoin is a currency. There are 11 million Bitcoin.
Look at the exchange rate in XE.com.” And then, “We control what is, all up, a
little over 1 million Bitcoin.” Do you see that?
A: Correct.
Q: Do you recall receiving this e-mail?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you believe by receiving this e-mail that Craig controlled over 1 million
Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: Was this statement that he controlled, all up, a little over 1 million Bitcoin
consistent with other statements that Craig had told you?
A: Yes.
Q: Did Craig ever tell you that this over 1 million Bitcoin was locked in a file
that he could not access?
A: No.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
Coincidentally, highly anticipated discussions about the possible holdings of
Satoshi Nakamoto had started five months earlier, in April 2013, ignited by
Sergio Demian Lerner on Bitcointalk. It is not unlikely that Craig Wright had
come across these discussions, as his email contains the exact same
number that Sergio mentions.
“My estimation is that [Satoshi Nakamoto] owns more than 1M BTC, or 100M
USD at current change.”
A few days later, on April 17, 2013, Sergio repeats the same estimation in a
blog post.
“I estimate at eyesight that Satoshi fortune is around 1M Bitcoins, or 100M
USD at current exchange rate.”
To add, Sergio’s research into the Satoshi stash is an easy inference to
draw for another reason too: during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, when
Craig Wright was requested to come up with a list of public addresses that
he supposedly mined in 2009 and 2010, he (incompetently) copied the
same filtering criteria that Sergio had been using in previous years. Craig’s
nChain colleague Steve Shadders then used these crippled Lerner criteria in
2019 for the creation of the so-called “Shadders List". The full breakdown of
the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit is, of course, another story for another day.
September 25, 2013: Craig sends email about Sukuriputo Okane project.
This email can be found in a June 3, 2019 post on Craig’s blog. At first
glance, it’s an impressively smart looking email from a very bright Bitcoin
architect-level developer. But is Craig Wright even such person?
No, of course not. He never was, and he never will be. Because at second
glance, one finds out that the meat of this email is simply copied from the
Bitcoin Wiki. For example, some of the text is taken — both in paraphrase
and verbatim form — from the Bitcoin Wiki Contract page, set up in 2012.
You will find basically this whole text mixed in Craig’s email below
The screenshot of the email from Craig’s blog:
This is, plain and simple, plagiarism, of which Craig once, in June 2008, said
“Plagiarism is more serious than most people think. It is a criminal breach of
both the copyright act and is also a criminal fraud.” in the comments to his
blog article “Tisk, tisk, tisk…” (scroll down a little for the comments
section).
And now that we’re on it anyway, this exact same text has been re-used by
Craig in a (backdated to April 5, 2013) chat correspondence with Mark
Ferrier to support the false MJF Mining story (see September 27, 2013
after the next image).
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/3/kleiman-v-wright/
September 27, 2013: Australian news media report that Mark Ferrier, the
son of a prominent insolvency expert has been arrested for a year-long
series of frauds which netted him several hundred thousand dollars.
We will see in Part 2 that Craig, never one to pass up an opportunity to re-
write history, after learning in the press of Mark Ferrier’s litany of fraudulent
business dealings, conjures up a series of purported business deals of
himself with Mr Ferrier, during his efforts to convince the ATO of his totally-
not-made-up Bitcoin holdings.
That last part should be read with a healthy dose of irony, of course.
Fact is, there is no evidence to show that Craig even had contact with Mr
Ferrier at all, let alone conducted sizeable business deals with him. What
there is, instead, is a trail of evidence discovered by the ATO of Craig
spinning off another arm of his complex web of lies, through pretend
contracts and contacts, fake software and supposed business partners who,
when questioned, confirmed they absolutely had nothing to do with any of
the supposed deals with Craig or his Potemkin Village companies. What you
will read, in Part 2 of this magnum opus, is how Craig was even caught out
buying domain names he then pretended were the legit support desk
operations for the fake banking software he pretended he’d paid for with
some of his vast Bitcoin wealth.
And to give the reader a taste already of how that works with Craig Wright’s
forgeries, here’s an example of what appears to be an email send to Craig
from the ‘Accounts’ department of MJF Mining on August 15, 2013.
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/4/kleiman-v-wright/ (page 266)
However, the domain ‘mjfminingservices.com’ was only (re-)created on
November 22, 2013. Recreated? Yes, recreated. On October 16, 2012, this
domain was created for the first time (allegedly by Mark Ferrier himself) but
after a year abandoned without ever any activity related to it. As it appears,
when Craig Wright started to ride along the MJF Mining news to create
another Potemkin Village to advance his Australian tax fraud, he obtained
this domain and started creating forged emails on them.
September 27, 2013: Craig informs about three upcoming private rulings.
It is currently unknown which three private rulings Craig Wright is referring
to, as the evidence only provides information about only one private ruling
around this timeframe: an ATO ruling about the nature of Bitcoin. This
private ruling was indeed expected in September, but was according Craig
only provided in December 2013, causing another point of friction and
obfuscation between Craig Wright and the ATO in 2014.
October 2, 2013: Craig wants to teach ATO how BTC works.
At the same time, he declares that “The group I head has a holding of $AU
100,000,000 in XBT (Bitcoin).”
The numbers are growing fast, it appears. Did Craig find enough dormant
Bitcoin addresses on the blockchain in the meantime to back this claim up?
October 4, 2013: The ATO troubles for Hotwire start.
An ATO Refund Integrity audit involving Hotwire (the ABN number 48 164
068 348 mentioned) has started, it appears. This is only 3 months after the
first lodgement of GST, and only within 3 weeks after the startup of the
Hotwire group! We accuse the ATO sometimes of being slow, but here they
obviously make up for that. Or was Craig Wright already a taxpayer with a
special status at ATO based on experiences with his tax claims in previous
fiscal years? At all times, this late 2013 Refund Integrity audit turned out to
be the kickoff of a years long, extremely thorough inquiry into Craig’s tax
claims and overall business dealings, ultimately leading to a total dismantling
of his Bitcoin fraud empire. And this case is very likely still not closed either
for Craig, as in 2018 he was still under criminal inquiry by the ATO Criminal
Investigations unit.
October 6, 2013: Craig responds to the Refund Integrity audit.
Only two of apparently seven emails are provided in the public court docket
of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Email one:
And the numbers keep growing again in email two:
“We have a capitalisation in the group of $230 million […] We control $165
million in XBT (Bitcoin).”
Wow. Craig Wright goes from almost bankrupt, in need of settling a debt of
$425,000 with Mr McArdle, arising from the decade-long pursuit of the
amount he owed following the 2003 DeMorgan debacle, to a capitalisation
of $230 million, within a few months. Amazing.
Except for the fact that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it
looks simply like Craig has been merely handpicking random public Bitcoin
addresses from the Bitcoin rich list, and claiming “I own this”. Truth is, even
to this day Craig has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary.
October 7, 2013: Craig’s first Bitcoin supercomputer “Sukuriputo Okane”
enters the scene!
Here we find the first of several (fake) projects that Craig Wright set up to
scam the ATO. ATO however was quick to find out that “much of the
application is taken from internet sources, without acknowledgement” and
that the examples of the R&D activities were also “taken, unacknowledged,
from an internet source”.
The reader only needs to scroll back to September 25, 2013 to know what
ATO is talking about.
And these are signature moves from Craig Wright again, as we will see this
type of plagiarism, literally copy-pasting from internet sources, is going
through Craig’s fraud career as a fine red thread. And would the
supercomputer disaster stop here? Don’t count on it…
October 9, 2013: Craig is being notified by the ATO that a refund is being
retained.
Now that would have hurt, we’re sure. Only a few months into the tax fraud,
with Hotwire ramping up hiring personnel and Craig living the dandy life, and
suddenly ATO starts cutting Craig’s most important source of income (94%,
remember?) already. This signal from the ATO will have substantial
consequences within a matter of months. We will come back to this in Part
2.
October 9, 2013: Craig opens up about the Bitcoin addresses he claims to
control.
This email is for a plethora of reasons hilarious. Read it, and weep.
Just a few of the notable things:
“The addresses are in my control now as a matter of fate and
circumstances.”
- our Faketoshi unraveled in one simple quote.
The address “16cou” has been signed “Craig is a liar and a fraud” in
2019. Evidence of that signing a little further down this article, as the
“16cou" address will pop up in more forgeries.
The address “1Feex” contains the Bitcoin stolen from Mt Gox on March
1, 2011. We will come back to that too. But it is hilarious to note that as
early as 2013, Craig already claimed ownership of this address, without
knowing its history (as Mt Gox database research would only start in
2014, and publications about the origins and history of the “1Feex”
address would only follow much later).
And as if this wasn’t enough already, the ATO figured also something out
about this email (see red box in the email). Craig was not only shamelessly
lying in the content of the email, he also put a forged image inside the email,
as a digital cherry on top of the fraud cake.
October 10, 2013: Craig speaks at DATACON Sydney conference.
Remarkably, this speech at the Hilton, Sydney appears not to have been
Bitcoin but cybersecurity related, although Craig advertised this event on
the Hotwire website.
Note how Craig called himself “Vice President” of Australia — Asia Pacific,
Global Institute for Cybersecurity & Research (GICSR). More about that in
Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2… (but to give a hint already, it’s not going
to end well again).
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20130914033439/http://www.cebit.com.au/datacon
October 12, 2013: Craig responds to the ongoing Refund Integrity audit.
Note that a Statutory Declaration by Stephen D’Emilio is mentioned as an
attachment, this document will be shown a bit later (and thoroughly
debunked, of course). Also note that now another Bitcoin number “we have
confirmed control of” is mentioned: 111,114 BTC. It appears as if Craig is now
fully introduced to the Bitcoin rich list, and adjusts the numbers as he went
ahead.
October 23, 2013: Jamie Wilson resigns from his CFO position.
Jamie Wilson’s career with Craig’s Hotwire group was, as said earlier,
shortlived. As Jamie started to notice an “uncomfortable and troubling”
pattern in Craig’s business dealings. In his deposition, Jamie explains:
“Q: Okay. And then as we have just seen you have resigned in October of
2013.
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell me why you resigned?
A: The reason for it is that I wasn’t feeling comfortable with the position of
what was happening and not understanding everything behind the
documentation and the accounts. That was the purpose of it. And also at the
same time my ex-wife had medical issues as well.
Q: Okay. Can you explain to me a little bit more what you meant, what you
mean by you weren’t comfortable with what was going on in the
documentation.
A: Well, in the lead up to my resignation, and it would have been over a 12-
month period, Craig did set up these companies. And I was working with
Craig, prior being on the board of White Ear and as an advisor to us in
regards to development. But, my trouble was, and it was exciting moving in
with him to start working on the new projects. But, where I didn’t feel
comfortable is Craig’s change of attitude from a developer that would be in
hoodies and, you know, very low key and working with, to one that, that is it,
I’ve got to be the man, I’ve got to be the CEO, new flash suits, ties, and it was
just a massive change from where he was conservative to right out there.
Also I didn’t agree on the employment of the staff and the buildup of these
companies without understanding, the full understanding, of where the
funding was coming from. So, I know there was a lot of Bitcoin there.
However, when I started to have a look at the R&D and the claiming of the
R&D, research and development, for the Australia federal government I didn’t
feel comfortable when I noticed that these amounts were from a U.S., and at
that time and I am still not aware if the money actually was funded by the
U.S. government. And I thought, well hang on, the Supreme Court of
Australia has turned around and brought this IP into Australia, and now Craig
is turning around and claiming the R&D on this money, that was paid by the
U.S. government. And I thought, this to me looks fraud. And, I want
nothing to do with it.
Q: So, you resigned?
A: I resigned. And since then I have had many times with the Australia
taxation office, coming and investigate where I had to give evidence and the
breakdown of it, purely because of, they put me under a microscope, the
ATO.
Q: And has the ATO found that you did anything wrong?
A: No, no.
Q: Okay. I am, and ATO is the Australia Tax Office?
A: Taxation Office.
Q: Okay.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
On a related sidenote, it will not surprise anyone, we are sure, that Jamie
Wilson is just one of numerous people (ranging from Greg Maxwell to Ira
Kleiman to Anonymous and many, many others, including the ATO
organization) accused by Craig Wright of hacking him, and altering existing
documents or even creating fraudulent documents from scratch.
Quotes from Craig’s blog post:
“Going right back to Jamie Wilson, who fabricated documents as CFO and
then left me without even giving me access to all of the documents he had
been working on, the story has been one of individuals who think they
deserve more than the salary that they are being paid. [from Jamie
Wilson’s deposition however: “I never got paid, never received a cent. It
was supposed to be an annual salary of what is here, 150,000. But it
never commenced. So, I got a tax bill for money I never received.”]
Multiple staff members of Hotwire sought to put the company into
liquidation and force such a scenario. At one point, Jamie Wilson had made a
deal with people in New York in 2013 to sell both my intellectual property
and my bitcoin. Mr Wilson was never involved with Dave Kleiman, had never
met him nor had any association with anything to do with him. He was CFO
of Hotwire, an Australian Company I founded between June 2013 and Nov
2013.
You wonder why he was fired.
I use companies for a reason. Unlike personal arrangements, you can set up
structures that cannot easily be bypassed. As an example, my dealings with
FASV where I created a set of intellectual property that was patented jointly
with Jamie were conducted with the company I owned called Panopticrypt.
Luckily, Mr Wilson had no idea of the corporate requirements of the
company. As such, his assignment documents that he filed are easily
invalidated.”
Craig Wright’s blog “On scammers” June 13, 2019
Now note that Craig Wright is stating:
“You wonder why [Jamie Wilson] was fired.”
This is obviously Craig lying again, as Jamie Wilson resigned on his own
initiative on October 23, 2013. There should be no glimpse of a doubt about
this fact, as Jamie repeated this several times under oath in his deposition,
supported by four pieces of evidence (one shown here):
4 letters of resignation, addressed to 4 different companies, can be found in the Jamie Wilson deposition. Source:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/511/9/kleiman-v-wright/
Craig Wright wouldn’t be Craig Wright of course, if he didn’t also accuse
Jamie Wilson of fraudulent activities during a deposition in the Kleiman v
Wright lawsuit. Craig has no shame lying inside a courtroom, under oath, or
writing false declarations under penalty of perjury. Which is telling about
what he is capable of outside a courtroom, isn’t it?
This behavior is part of a con man strategy called “You got something
(innocence) I do not; I gonna make you equal.”. A more popular version of
this mantra, sometimes appointed to Machiavelli, is “Accuse your enemy of
that which you’re guilty of yourself.” to obfuscate, divide and conquer. We
have to give it to Craig; this works well for him, to a certain extent.
“A: The HTC phone was actually a company phone that was run by a number
of people in the system engineering department. It was designed to have
apps that we were developing run on it. I did not realise that after I had given
it back to the company, after doing some demonstrations, that I had not
wiped it, which would allow people to keep using my e-mail and have access
to other such things. On top of that, there are IP addresses associated with
Big Pond and other accounts in Brisbane. The Brisbane IP addresses are not
mine. Some of those are associated with Jamie Wilson and other people.
Jamie Wilson was working with a person that I fired and also Jamie Wilson
has fabricated a number of documents, such as a power of attorney over the
patent that I created. He has fraudulently created assignment documents to
file the patent in America and has actually used my signature, if we call it
that, to file those documents. Investigation of the documentation from the
lawyers has turned up that some of the signatures that are on some of my
documents — ‘my’ — turn out to be signed by someone else’s hand. Some of
that hand in some of the early ones also happens — which I have not gone
over with my lawyers in full detail yet and I will not here — to match Mr.
Wilson. Mr. Wilson seeks to keep IP that is not his. Other people in my
company sought to sell some of the intellectual property that I was working
on. We have documented exchanges between some of the people who were
let go and companies, including a French bank, for the sale of intellectual
property. Jamie Wilson had potentially a deal for $100 million. If that deal had
gone through and he had managed to get access to the intellectual property,
some of the staff members, including some of the development and coding
staff, would have been cut in on the deal. The IP addresses of each of those
machines, of course, is suspect.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright (deposition
March 18, 2020)
And, as always, Craig Wright didn’t follow up with an inquiry, filing a police
report, let alone that he sued Jamie Wilson, or anyone else for that matter,
for this supposed doctoring of documents and other fraud.
November 4, 2013: Craig files affidavit at New South Wales Supreme Court.
For who’s interested, please check out the link above, as this Affidavit filing
is a 105 pages long treasure dome of Craig Wright lies and forgeries. Allow
us to show you two of them.
To star t with, par ts of a deed, (back)dated to April 22, 2011.
Appears legit, doesn’t it? But nah. In the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit we learned
that Dave Kleiman’s signature was substantially different, making this deed
document another forgery created by Craig Wright to support his false
claims.
Secondly, Craig Wright also produced a “Statutory Declaration” dated
October 11, 2013, signed by a solicitor called Stephen D’Emilio and co-
signed by a witness solicitor called Adrian Fong, with his Affidavit, obviously
prepared to support the ATO tax fraud (see email earlier) and the two false
NSW Supreme Court claims. At closer inspection, we notice several
anomalies.
Firstly, the “1Feex” address mentioned in the list never belonged to Craig
Wright. The “1Feex” address is where someone who hacked Mt Gox on
March 1, 2011 parked some 80,000 stolen BTC.
Irony has it that Craig Wright, still not backing down on his Satoshi cosplay,
is currently chasing 16 developers in court to get access to the Bitcoin on
this same address, in a case, unsurprisingly, loaded again with lies and
forgeries. Craig Wright is represented in this case by an UK law firm called
ONTIER who, incompetently or being complicit in Craig’s fraud, totally
missed (or willingly ignored) this, and many other, forgeries.
Needless to say that either way, this chasing of the holdings on the “1Feex”
address will, of course, fail miserably again in the legal long run for all parties
involved.
Another address on the list in the “Statutory Declaration”, the one starting
with “16cou”, has been signed by the true owner in 2019, firmly and not
incorrectly declaring “Craig is a liar and a fraud”. If this isn’t proof enough
already that the whole NSW Supreme Court claims case is a farce and a
fraud, we don’t know what is. There are several more forgeries supporting
the Affidavit, but let’s leave it at this.
November 6, 2013: Craig is, seemingly against all odds, awarded the ~$57
million that he claimed in July/August 2013 by the New South Wales
Supreme Court.
Except that, as the court ruling states: “the court notes the agreement of the
parties that the plaintiff will accept the transfer of Intellectual Property held
by the plaintiff in full and final satisfaction of the judgement”.
And this is what it was all about for Craig Wright. To lay his hands on non-
existing Intellectual Property, and give it a court approved valuation. As
Satoshi Itches explains:
“The point is that he now has “evidence” provided by the court that he owns
over $50M worth of IP. He can now sell that “IP” to his various Australian
companies, and claim tax and R&D concessions based on this.” — Satoshi
Itches (who provides an even more detailed breakdown of Craig’s $57 million
court fraud)
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/7/kleiman-v-wright/
But unsurprisingly, given the lack of Supreme Court’s truthfinding process
and therefore ‘missing’ the numerous lies and forgeries that Craig Wright
dumped in the $57 million duo-claim, ATO (some critical notes from them in
the screenshot above) would in later years consider this fraudulently
obtained ruling as a “nullity based on sham”. We will come back to that in
more detail in Part 2.
Note that these 2 cases cannot be found anymore on the Australian New
South Wales Caselaw website. It appears that they have been deleted from
the court’s systems as they were based on fraudulent information provided
by plaintiff Craig Wright.
November 23, 2013: Craig (after divorcing Lynn Black in 2012) marries
Ramona Watts.
November 25, 2013: Craig sells 23.4 BTC on Mt Gox.
November 28, 2013: Craig buys 17.2 BTC on Mt Gox.
December 2013: The falsely obtained W&K IP gets divided inside Craig’s
Potemkin Village.
To give an idea about the many, many millions of dollars that Craig Wright
created from thin air, first coming in with the false NSW Supreme Court
claims, then going out again in the Hotwire group of companies, here a page
from the “Certificate For Advance Finding” from AusIndustry from the early
days (signed November 6, 2014 by David Wilson — General Manager R&D
Tax Incentive). And remember, this is *only* a peek inside one of Craig’s
companies, namely Coin-Exch Pty Ltd where Craig claims to have made over
$50 million in costs!
Note that Craig backdated the whole R&D claim to the Australian fiscal year
2012/2013, running from July 2012 to June 2013. At the same time we know
that almost 50% of the Hotwire group’s companies (like Integyrz Pty Ltd and
Interconnected Research Pty Ltd) had only been raised in the next fiscal
year: 2013/2014. Knowing this, it will come as no surprise for anyone we are
sure, in Part 2 we will learn that Craig will start backdating numerous, and
that is an understatement in this case, digital documents like emails, deeds,
contracts, bookkeeping entries like sales and purchase invoices, and a lot
more.
December 6, 2013: And another supercomputer enters the scene!
Meet C01N, the second supercomputer that Craig Wright claims to have had
in the early years. He actually claimed C01N was already in use in
September 2012!
It appears ATO was not very impressed with this machine. Nor with Craig’s
performance in handling the audit. From one of the ATO reports:
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/7/kleiman-v-wright/
December 24, 2013: Craig files a lawsuit against Mark Ferrier/MJF Mining.
Unfortunately the sources for this case, and the 2 W&K claims just
concluded in November 2013, on Australian’s New South Wales Caselaw
website are not available anymore. But it’s not a stretch, we presume, to
conclude that with the recent success of obtaining two rulings for almost
$57 million against W&K Info Defense Research LLC, Craig felt confident
enough to try the same type of trick one more time. Now against Mark
Ferrier, about which he had read in September earlier. Better prepared now,
with aforementioned experience with W&K in the pocket, the ruling for
almost $60 million followed quickly in February 2014.
January 3, 2014: Craig expands his Bitcoin fraud empire to the UK.
As Craig buys 2 UK shelf companies from CFS International Formations Ltd:
Design By Human Ltd (raised October 10, 2012)
Permanent Success Ltd (raised October 18, 2012)
And from here, Craig sets up an, at times hilariously incompetent, trail of
backdated forgeries and filings at Companies House UK, to change the
history of these previously empty companies, with appointments for, there
he is again, (deceased) Dave Kleiman and Uyen Nguyen.
January 7, 2014: Craig renames the 2 UK companies.
Design By Human Ltd becomes C01N Ltd
Permanent Success Ltd becomes Denariuz Ltd
Faketoshi Fun Fact: It appears the same agent, on the same day, also
changed the name of another company, Achieve and Succeed Ltd to
Denariuz Ltd and then back again.
And according other Companies House filings on this date, Craig Wright
appoints himself Director for both renamed companies per January 3, 2014
too.
January 8, 2014: Craig sends email as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’
The following email was part of the Wired/Gizmodo dox package, and is one
of the earliest known examples where Craig ‘(possibly…)’ is starting his
Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay. Note that the amount “we control” is upped
further to $700 million.
A peculiar detail about this email is the email address:
satoshi@vistomail.com. This is an actual email address that Satoshi
Nakamoto used when he was around in 2008–2011. So how would Craig
Wright have obtained that email address? Could it be that he is Satoshi
Nakamoto after all?
No, of course not.
Because, as we know from another email, dated 2015, from the very same
email address, of which the header metadata has been inquired:
Knowing how to spoof a Satoshi email, combined with Craig’s knowledge of
“metadata” (scroll back for his July 21, 2012 blog post) and his preference
for creating fake emails by the truckloads to support his false Satoshi claims,
it is more likely than not that this is one of his many forgeries again. To be
fair, we can only be sure after a more indepth forensic inquiry, of course.
January 22, 2014: Craig withdraws 3 BTC from Mt Gox.
This would be Craig’s last transaction on Mt Gox, before its collapse. A full
overview of Craig’s trading and transacting between April 2013 and January
2014:
February 4, 2014: Craig receives successful judgment in MJF Mining
lawsuit.
The lawsuit filed against MJF Mining on December 24, 2013 comes to
conclusion. Craig is awarded a judgment/order for almost $60 million.
Let’s recap. By now Craig managed to create from thin air:
$28,254,666.00 (W&K claim 1)
$28,534,049.79 (W&K claim 2)
$59,141,505.00 (MJF Mining)
For a total of $115,930,220.79 in fraudulent claims.
Note again that, just like the 2 W&K Info Defense Research LLC cases from
July 2013 — November 2013, this case also cannot be found anymore on
the Australian New South Wales Caselaw website. It appears that this case
also has been deleted from the court’s systems as it was, also, based on
fraudulent information provided by plaintiff Craig Wright.
February 7, 2014: Mt Gox halts all trading.
February 10, 2014: Hotwire starts tweeting.
This is the first of only four tweets that Hotwire ever produced. We notice
roaring marketing buzz about “Worlds First Bitcoin Bank", but knowing it’s a
paper-only scheme to defraud ATO for millions… A sick tweet.
Now let’s have a look at the Hotwire website, on Wayback Machine as Craig
Wright deleted all online presence from this era. We notice several of the
companies (but not the full ten that he announced on his blog in September
2013 though) that had recently been raised by Craig, and at closer look:
Craig summarizes his experience up to 2014, almost exclusively in the fields
of Information Technology and Cybersecurity, Research and Forensics.
There is notably no link or overlap whatsoever with the cypherpunk era
designing, coding and launching of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto. But that’s
not a surprise, of course.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20140303040112/http://www.hotwirepe.com/our_businesses.html
February 11, 2014: First email to Kleiman estate.
This is the moment, the first written statement where Craig Wright explicitly
and unambiguously attempts to connect himself, together with Dave
Kleiman, to the pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency,
Satoshi Nakamoto.
“Your son Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin"
What is remarkable about this moment, it appears as if Craig Wright is only
testing the waters for this false claim, in the closed environment of a
private conversation that he controls, with a small group of uninformed and
gullible listeners. Craig has not, and will not anytime soon, make such claim,
or anything close to it, to the ATO, for example.
Having been relying on merely conjuring up ownership of vast Bitcoin wealth
for his tax fraud schemes, he now, some 10 months after the death of his
friend Dave Kleiman, contacts the family to advise them that they probably
shouldn’t delete anything on Dave’s hard drives because he’s going to tell
them of a fortune in Bitcoin they made and shared. This, again, some 10
months after Dave had died.
Absurdly, in later years, Craig’s legal strategy against the Kleiman estate
would see him attempt to bring suit against Ira Kleiman for ‘failing to protect
the interests’ of his fictitious ‘Tulip Trust’, due to the fact in the 10 months
Craig took to contact them following Dave’s death, the hard drives had,
indeed, been formatted. If only he’d thought to say something sooner, right?
From here, for many months more, even more than a year we will learn,
Craig will keep his alleged involvement with Bitcoin to the level of “mining
Bitcoin since 2009". Is he afraid that the false Satoshi Nakamoto claim will
be called out in no time by a more informed, more experienced audience,
well connected in the Bitcoin community?
He should be afraid. And he will be called out numerous times too.
Because Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. He’s a cosplayer, falsely and
fraudulently pretending to be someone he isn’t, for his own financial
benefits, about which we will learn a lot more in Part 2, when his cosplaying
further develops.
Outtro
We have arrived at the end of Part 1. We have covered the root era
November 2003 — February 2014 of the brazen con man Craig Wright,
charting a detailed timeline of events showing his early tax rebate frauds
being scaled up through his plan to claim ownership of Bitcoin he never had,
to the point where he has decided to commit to the final step of actually
declaring himself to be responsible for the creation of Bitcoin, to be Satoshi,
himself, and lay claim to the fabled ‘Satoshi Stash’.
Now please come back for Part 2, where we will cover February 2014 —
December 2014, an era with even more lies, more forgeries, and more
Faketoshi drama.
Thanks for reading.
To be continued... In Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2
After this first, and only, interaction on Twitter Craig Wright blocked @MyLegacyKit. So Satoshi.
