Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 3
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
We hope you truly enjoyed:
- “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”
- “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2”
Let’s recap Part 2, which covers the whole of 2014, for a bit before we
continue with Part 3 which will cover the year 2015. This will also bring us to
the closure of this epic series. Spoiler alert, in 2015 Craig’s Bitcoin related
Potemkin Village will be completely demolished by the ATO, leaving Craig
desperately looking for a multi-million-dollar bailout, then fleeing Australia
and setting up camp in London after having convinced a credulous billionaire
to believe in his discredited and extraordinarily-tall tales of billion-dollar
Bitcoin stashes and blue-chip IP supposedly made all-the-more valuable by
his up-till-today unproven claim to be ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.
February 2014
Craig is feeling the pressure from the ATO investigators, who are clearly not
swallowing his contrived story of hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of
Bitcoin-based business transactions he has based multiple multi-million-
dollar cash rebate claims on, Bitcoin he can provide no evidence for ever
having owned in the first place, leading him to commit to the next step of his
desperate plan. Some ten months after the death of his friend he emails
Dave Kleiman’s family in the US and tells them that he and David were, “two
of the three key people behind Bitcoin”.
That is how he, with support of Dave’s family, intends to explain away to the
ATO how he, Craig Wright, could have hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of BTC — by staking claim to the famed ‘Satoshi Stash’!
As for Dave’s family, he just strings them along for several years with
repeated talk of potential billions in wealth they could be in line for,
persistently changing the narrative as he progresses it, conjuring up
supposed ‘offshore trusts’ and, ultimately, offering them shares in his
companies in return for them signing away their rights to it all, so as to avoid
the one thing he cannot actually do, send any of the Bitcoin anywhere.
Because to do that, one would actually have to have the private keys and,
until proven otherwise, the only person who would have those keys is the
real ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.
Back to 2014. Craig went through a year of further ATO scrutiny, and at least
four hearings and meetings with the ATO would be scheduled, where we
find Craig making the most outrageous claims about his Bitcoin holdings,
hinting to offshore trusts all over the globe, and finally setting one up in
October 2014: the empty shelf company Tulip Trading Ltd will become, with
numerous backdated forgeries, one of the outlets forming the infamous Tulip
Trust.
As we have evidenced in the previous two articles, there have been several
of Craig Wright’s frauds, running into the 100s of millions of dollars in false
bookkeeping, exposed so far:
The multitude of contradictory claims of Bitcoin spends where he
cannot show ever having controlled the Bitcoin addresses when asked
to by the ATO
The David Rees cosplay — His claims of large Bitcoin payments by
supposedly posting private keys of wallet addresses to the elderly and
dementia-suffering Professor David Rees, for ‘consulting’; something
the Professor’s family rejected as a complete fabrication
The Deborah Kobza cosplay — The fraudulent claims of massive multi-
millions-dollar business transactions he supposedly conducted for
GICSR, a wholly outrageous assertion for a small non-profit
organisation which never occurred, according to the court deposition of
its own founder, Deborah Kobza
The UK companies fraud — His purchasing of ‘readymade’ off-the-
shelf companies from a UK formation agent, for which he dishonestly
created backdated contracts and legal filings dated years prior to when
he had actually bought them, in an attempt to deceive the ATO
investigators
A Seychelles ‘readymade’ company ‘Tulip Trading Ltd’ he bought which,
again, he tried faking backdated trust documents for
The Mark Ferrier/MJF Mining fraud — A multi-million-dollar ‘deal’ with a
fugitive conman for, industrial mining software, gold ore and banking
software, for which the ‘proof’ he supplied to the ATO was exposed by
them as being faked, with email chains from domains which didn’t exist
at the date of the email, to ‘support’ services for the banking software
from a domain purchased on his own credit card and fake software
licenses
The NSW Supreme Court fraud — His false representations to the NSW
Supreme Court, where in his attempt to ‘astroturf’ value to his
fraudulent tax rebates, he executed a pantomime ‘recovery’ of multi-
million-dollars-worth of bitcoin and IP from the dormant US company
Dave Kleiman had set up. Falsely claiming that the US DoD and DHS
had used software he’d developed, as well as staking claim to non-
existent bitcoin he’d loaned it
… and so we continue with Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 3.
Disclaimer: The reader will see, at times, the $ symbol being used. Since
Craig Wright lived in Australia in the timeframe of these articles, the $
symbol used in numbers related to Craig will always refer to the Australian
dollar (AUD), except where indicated otherwise.
Spring/Summer 2015: Bitcoin Belle introduces Craig Wright in the Bitcoin
community.
Roughly late first, or in the second quarter of 2015, Craig starts infiltrating in
the Bitcoin community. On Twitter, but also in real life. Crucial in this point of
time is Bitcoin Belle (real name: Michele Seven). Michele was interviewed by
Hackernoon (writer: OrphanBlocks) in April 2018, and we learned quite a few
interesting tidbits about Craig Wright’s wheelings and dealings in 2015.
Michele Seven, Twitter profile image 2014
The following quotes are all taken from the Hackernoon article, intertwined
with a few notes and comments from the undersigned between […].
“It’s no stretch to say that Craig Wright is a bonafide “personality” in the
blockchain space regardless of whether he actually is Satoshi… and it’s quite
interesting to explore how he actually got there.
[Note: It is true that, as of writing the Hackernoon article in April 2018, Craig
Wright had indeed become a notorious ‘personality’ in the blockchain space.
After the December 2015 Wired/Gizmodo turmoil, and the May 2016 signing
sessions debacle, labelling him as ‘bonafide’ is a bit of a stretch though, of
course.]
The answer of course is through Bitcoin Belle.
Here is a very quick rundown (for those of you that did not have the pleasure
of being around in 2015) of the “version of events” that most people seem to
believe:
Craig contacts Bitcoin Belle in early 2015. Convinces her that he is
Satoshi. The two begin a relationship of sorts. [Note: The two begin a
relationship seemingly predicated on Craig convincing Michelle of his
wealth, power, high-level contacts, hacking abilities, whatever it took to
reel her in on the idea he could potentially ‘fix’ a family problem of hers
which, in her desperation to believe he could be some sort of ‘deus ex
machina’ in the face of her distressing situation, she fell for, hook, line
and sinker.]
Source: https://twitter.com/satoshi_n_/status/855837033956343814
Bitcoin Belle introduces Craig to a bunch of other influencers and uses
her own credibility in the space to get him onto panels and conferences.
People like John Matonis, Roger Ver and Gavin Andresen [Note: it is
uncertain if Gavin Andresen is already aware of Craig Wright at this
point in time: Summer 2015] believe Craig is Satoshi and risk their
reputations to support him.
Craig drops Bitcoin Belle once he has enough contacts and
introductions. The two stop speaking until Bitcoin Belle arranges a panel
event later that year [We will come back to this panel in greater detail
later] with a host of big names including Nick Szabo, who until that
point had not made a public appearance in forever.
Craig takes the bait, accepts a place on the panel but does not use the
conference to announce himself as Satoshi. Bitcoin Belle does not press
further with her questions (perhaps still believing he might be Satoshi)
and Nick Szabo only has a limited tussle with Craig much to Bitcoin
Belle’s chagrin.
Craig Wright once he has seduced enough of the community eventually
announces himself as Satoshi … but as mentioned earlier, the proof he
provides is found to be not sufficient [Note: the supposed proof is
quickly exposed by multiple Bitcoin and cryptography experts as being
nothing but a pubkey copy of an old, blockchain-viewable, Satoshi-
transaction] and as a result the community turns on him and Bitcoin
Belle for facilitating his introduction.
She made introductions for Craig to Jon Matonis and Roger Ver. The former
was unable to find the US$2 million that Craig needed but until recently
performed the role of Vice President at nChain (Craig’s company).
Roger however was more than happy to jump at the opportunity of helping
“Satoshi” as long as Craig was able to provide some form of crypto-
graphical proof. Craig provided the same proof that was refuted by the
community a few months later, but Roger was easily duped at this point.”
Taken from Hackernoon “Bitcoin Belle’s CCme: The woman who brought you
Craig ‘Satoshi’ Wright strikes again…”
Michele Seven, Twitter profile image 2015
Now read that last paragraph again… Is it remotely possible that Roger Ver
loaned, or gave, Craig Wright US$2,000,000 for a fake signing in 2015? On
the other hand, when Roger and Craig nuked their relationship in November
2018, Craig send Roger an email, implying there was never proof provided.
Or, in the alternative, Roger had found out the signing was… fake?
Again we see Craig Wright here in full petulant-child angry-tantrum mode,
as usual whenever his ‘reality’ is being challenged. For nearly twenty years
of documented history, from DeMorgan to his ‘Satoshi’ cosplay, you can see
examples of how he ropes in gullible investors by masquerading as a world-
class expert in whichever field his con is related to, before turning on them
when the charade is exposed and he is held to account. So at all times, this
is again a perfect example how Craig is attempting to defraud governments
and gullible, rich investors.
March 26, 2015: The SGI letter forgery.
Remember October 2013, when Craig filed the “Sukuriputo Okane”
supercomputer project for R&D tax rebates? In March 2015, the ATO is
starting to inquire into this ‘multi-million-dollar project’, so Craig quickly
forges a fake SGI letter and puts it on the CloudCroft website — another
Potemkin-village facade, of course.
If you’ve read the previous articles in the series, when it comes to just how
inept Craig is at these fakes and forgeries, you surely know what is coming
next…
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20200229045943/http://cdn1.spotidoc.com/store/data/001035994_1-
b8959504f48a66c79da40c4acb98b77c.png
March/April 2015: The “Sukuriputo Okane” project starts falling apart.
The ATO, having visited the premises of Craig Wright as part of their in-
depth and (still-to-this-day!) ongoing investigation into Craig Wright and his
supposed multi-million-dollar business activities find… drum roll please… no
evidence that this supercomputer exists at all.
And as a result, the ever-suitable Faketoshi mantra “[Craig Wright] had not
provided any evidence” can be found two handfuls of times, in different
shapes and forms, in the relevant section of one of the ATO reports. He
won’t be holding back on the wildly fabricated R&D claims just yet, though,
because at this time Craig has only had the visit, but not the report of their
findings yet, findings which are painfully detailed:
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/7/kleiman-v-wright/
May 2015: Craig adjusts the June 2014 “Bitcoin” blog forgery.
In a really-weak attempt to pretend like he wants to cover-up his since-
proven-to-be-a-backdated-fake January 10, 2009 Bitcoin ‘launch’ post,
Craig goes back and deletes that fake, to replace it with another, albeit,
rather than remove reference to Bitcoin he leaves it there knowing that
credulous investigators can see his previous ‘I am implying that I am Satoshi’
version viewable on the Wayback Machine.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20150525050803/http://gse-
compliance.blogspot.com/2009_01_04_archive.html
May 11, 2015: DeMorgan $54 million R&D tax rebate announced.
But just when you start thinking, this will be the end of Craig Wright’s false
claims, his lies and forgeries are exposed, and he will finally back down…
that’s not how it works with Craig. He will always try to double down, cover
up an old lie with a new lie, push old forgeries aside as “the dog ate my
homework”, or, to stick with his years long narrative, “I was hacked”. So
Craig wrapped the smoking remains of the bankrupt Hotwire Group together
under a new label DeMorgan Group, and tried the same tax fraud again for
even larger numbers.
“Adding to the big numbers, DeMorgan Ltd announced in a press release
that it had received Australia’s largest R&D Advanced Finding from
AusIndustry and would as such be eligible to receive approximately
$54,000,000 in R&D cash rebate for the R&D activities conducted in the
2014/15 financial year.” — Grant Central, May 18, 2015
But, this is the last time we hear about R&D tax rebates from Craig Wright.
From here onward, the storm that had been brewing since ATO’s Refund
Integrity department started their inquiry late 2013 into Craig’s fraudulent
tax return claims, events would quickly start to spiral downward.
Nik Cubrilovic, who, as an Australian citizen, witnessed events from close by,
noted on Reddit and on his blog:
“I don’t think the $54 million refund was ever paid, but he was paid earlier
$6M and ~$2M refunds — he became more brazen but the last figure was
too much even for the ATO (it was a larger claim than what even Google or
Atlassian make)
There is also the sales tax case where the ATO found against him and
penalized his company, Hotwire, $1.7 million. The way this worked is Wright
funded the company with $30 million worth of Bitcoin. The company then
purchased software from another Wright entity for $29 million. The first
company then made a sales tax refund claim for this purchase and sought
~$3 million as a refund. What Wright was effectively doing was creating $3
million in real-cash refund from the tax office by transferring imaginary
Bitcoins between himself. I detail how this worked in my blog post from
yesterday.
That entity went from being founded to shutdown in months. The DeMorgan
entity seemed to exist solely to make R&D claims from the Australian
government.
Wright’s primary MO these past few years, prior to fleeing Australia, was
using various entities to create real-dollar tax refunds out of non-existent
Bitcoins. I’m surprised it worked for as long as it did.
These cases do explain his motive for why he presented himself as Satoshi
Nakamoto.” — Nik Cubrilovic on Reddit
Nik went the extra mile in his inquiry of what happened in this era, and spoke
with several eyewitnesses. From his epic blog post of May 2, 2016 called
“Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto” we take the following quote:
“The experience of those who have worked for or know Craig Wright. Sydney
is a global city but in many ways it is a small town — I found out after the
Wired report that I knew two people who had worked for Wright. Since the
stories published today I have come to hear — either directly or second-
hand — from a number of other people who either worked for or knew
Wright. The conclusion is near-unanimous: Wright is not Satoshi
Nakamoto, and is not capable of being Satoshi Nakamoto. One friend
described how Wright is so convincing that even tho he knew he wasn’t
capable of creating Bitcoin, he would at times even doubt himself. Another
said that Wright has everybody convinced for at least a short period — but
then it begins to unravel as his actions do not match his word. He came away
from his experience convinced that Wright is a fraud. Yet another person
who worked for Wright characterized him (via a third-party) as “the best
conman i’ve ever met”.” — Nik Cubrilovic
May 29, 2015: Craig tweets about his 2 supercomputers.
Notice that Craig puts a hashtag with SGI in his tweet, as if SGI had
something to do with Craig Wright and the supercomputers mentioned. That
remains to be seen, though, as in December 2015 ZDNet figured a few
things out about SGI. They wrote about these findings in their article “SGI
denies links with alleged bitcoin founder Craig Wright”. A few quotes:
“However, Cassio Conceicao, SGI EVP and chief operating officer, has told
ZDNet that despite this, SGI has never had any contact with Cloudcroft or
Wright. “Cloudcroft has never been an SGI customer and SGI has no
relationship with Cloudcroft CEO Craig Steven Wright,” he said.
Conceicao added that SGI has no record of the C01N supercomputer being
purchased or serviced by the firm. The C01N supercomputer, which was
placed at number 17 on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputer in
November [2015], is another supercomputer that Wright apparently owns. It
was allegedly created when Wright merged C01N and Tulip Trading,
Cloudcroft’s supposed flagship supercomputer, into a single high
performance computer. “SGI has no record of the CO1N supercomputer ever
being purchased or serviced from SGI, therefore SGI suspects it may have
been purchased on the grey market,” Conceicao said. “SGI does not operate,
maintain, or provide any services for this supercomputer.”” — Aimee
Chanthadavong (ZDNet)
Note that SGI/Conceicao is implying that Craig Wright ‘could’ have bought
an actual supercomputer on the grey market. This, we will learn further
down the road, didn’t happen either. But at this moment in time SGI didn’t
and couldn’t know better, and they needed to carefully hedge on their
statement as they could not explicitly claim (yet) that Craig didn’t have any
supercomputer at all.
June 22, 2015: The ATO writes to Craig’s Tax Lawyer, Andrew Sommer,
declaring the outcome of their audit investigation and, whoops, Craig is now
on the hook for a whopping $5.68 million in tax levied against the business
including an almost $1.9 million fine for Coin-Exch Pty Ltd.
Screenshot from the ATO Completion of audit letter
The 7 page long ‘ATO Completion of audit’ letter is, to make an
understatement, a pretty interesting read. It explains in every painful detail
the level of ‘reckless’ fraud that Craig Wright had executed with his
company Coin-Exch:
“You made a statement to the Commissioner by lodging your activity
statement. The statement was false or misleading as it incorrectly stated the
assessed net amount. The assessed net amount includes any amount of
GST that you have to pay.
MT 2008/1 explains that recklessness is gross carelessness. You act
recklessly when your conduct clearly shows disregard of, or indifference to,
consequences that are foreseeable by a reasonable person as being a likely
result of your actions. We have determined that you are liable to an
administrative penalty because you behaved recklessly when you made the
statement. This is because the facts show that you should have reasonably
foreseen that your actions may have led to a shortfall amount.”
And here, with this rather massive amount to pay without any sights on
further tax returns, Craig knew he was cornered and needed an urgent
bailout.
Meanwhile, Business Insider Australia provided a further update on
December 9, 2015 about the struggles of Hotwire, the company of Craig
that was put under administration in April 2014 to wind down its debts in the
years after.
A few quotes from their article “REVEALED: The ATO’s $1.7M penalty on a
company owned by the Australian ‘Bitcoin mastermind’”:
“At the centre of the dispute is Hotwire’s 2014 tax return and some $3.4
million claimed as GST tax credits. Hotwire’s tax return also gives rise to a
$5.5 million income tax refund, but Business Insider understands this has not
been released by the ATO.
The company’s tax return is now being handled by the arm of the ATO which
specialises in high net worth individuals.
“The ATO has disputed the validity of the amounts claimed and has levied a
penalty on Hotwire of $1,716,608.00 in respect of the lodgement,” the
McGrath Nicol administrators write. “We understand that the Directors
dispute the position adopted by the ATO.”
After Hotwire went into voluntary administration, its creditors agreed last
year to strike a Deed of Company Agreement, a deal to stop the company
going into liquidation. Some repayments to creditors have been made,
although other expected payments throughout this year have failed to
materialise, in part because the expected ATO refund hasn’t shown up.
There is a further Bitcoin-related twist, however: the failure of Hotwire was
attributed in May 2014 partly to the disintegration of the Mt Gox Bitcoin
exchange, which famously imploded in February of last year with the loss of
more than $US450 million worth of Bitcoins.
Hotwire hit problems in April of last year when it failed to receive another
expected tax rebate worth millions of dollars, killing its cash flow. McGrath
Nicol wrote to creditors in May 2014:
The Directors have attributed the failure of the Company to:
– delays in receiving the $3.1 million GST refund for the September 2013
quarter; and
– Dr Wright, as the major shareholder no longer being able to provide
financial accommodation to the Company due to the collapse of the
Mount Gox Bitcoin registry where we understand Dr Wright had a
significant exposure [Note: an exposure of 14.63 Bitcoin, valued ~$8,050
at the moment of collapse].
In its update to creditors last month, McGrath Nicol wrote: “We note that
since the FY14 Tax Return was filed, it has been allocated to the Private
Groups & High Wealth Individuals team within the ATO, which has made
several detailed requests for additional information.”
Business Insider understands that with the $5.5 million refund not
forthcoming to pay the creditors, the money is expected to come from
another source, potentially Wright himself.”
Well, no.
June 29, 2015: Craig Wright’s bail out starts taking shape.
Craig, having been feverishly pumping out plenty of ‘astroturf’ implying his
‘Satoshiness’ which, while failing to convince the astute investigators of the
ATO, has now managed to reel in a credulous billionaire and his lackeys, is
incredibly now being bailed out for almost $15,000,000.
Finally, his ‘Satoshi’ cosplay is going to garner some real cash payout other
than fraudulent tax rebates!
A ‘Summary Of Agreed Terms’ is made up, signed by Ramona Watts
(DeMorgan), Stefan Matthews (The Sterling Group) and Craig Wright (on
behalf of himself).
$1,500,000 Asset Purchase for IP and technologies DeMorgan et al
$4,800,000 Services Agreement to set up nChain
$2,500,000 Convertible Loan, consisting of:
- $1,500,000 for legal costs associated with ATO matters, patent filings
- $1,000,000 for nChain
$3,500,000 Rights and Services Agreement for Craig Wright:
- $1,000,000 initial payment
- $500,000 per year salary for 5 years
- His Life Story Rights
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/45/kleiman-v-wright/
First, note how $1,500,000 is being paid under ‘Asset Purchase’ for Craig
Wright’s IP and technologies. Now also note that this IP and technology
stack also contains the fraudulently obtained $57,000,000 in IP from the
New South Wales Supreme Court claims against W&K Info Defense
Research LLC in late 2013 (which turned out to be a “nullity based on sham”
according the ATO, but do you think the bail out contract partners, except
Craig Wright of course, were aware of these details: probably not)!
Now that we’re at it anyway, what other valuations for Craig’s business
dealings popped up in those years? Early 2014, within mere months from the
end of the NSWSC claims case aforementioned, but just before they went
bankrupt in April that year, Hotwire was ‘valued’ at $276,268,599:
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/42/kleiman-v-wright/
In November 2014, when DeMorgan was starting to take care of the remains
of Hotwire, this valuation was upped a notch to $378,475,713 according a
report of a company called Business Reports & Values (BRV):
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/41/kleiman-v-wright/
So it appears Stefan Matthews obtained things for pennies on the dollar,
buying all this ‘valuable’ IP and technologies from Craig Wright for only
$1,500,000. If only Craig Wright was happily accepted as Satoshi Nakamoto
by the wider public next, then this would have been the business deal of the
century!
Now, having arrived at June 29, 2015, we also start touching the timeline of
Arthur van Pelt’s other article “The Craig Wright May 2016 Signing
Sessions Debacle, In Full Context” here.
A few quotes from that article go deeper into the Life Story Rights:
“On this day, a contract was signed with Craig Wright, Ramona Watts
(Craig’s wife) and Stefan Matthews that contains the following paragraph
about “the exclusive rights to Craig’s life story for subsequent publication or
release (suggest NewCo retain a researcher and ghost writer [Note: this
turned out to be Andrew O’Hagan, author of The Satoshi Affair] to begin
background research and preparation, as precautionary measure).”.
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/45/kleiman-v-wright/
It is, of course, also perfectly clear that the financial stakes are high for
camp Craig Wright.
“The plan was always clear to the men behind nCrypt. They would bring
Wright to London and set up a research and development centre for him,
with around thirty staff working under him. They would complete the work on
his inventions and patent applications — he appeared to have hundreds of
them — and the whole lot would be sold as the work of Satoshi
Nakamoto, who would be unmasked as part of the project. Once
packaged, Matthews and MacGregor planned to sell the intellectual
property for upwards of a billion dollars. MacGregor later told me he was
speaking to Google and Uber, as well as to a number of Swiss banks. ‘The
plan was to package it all up and sell it,’ Matthews told me. ‘The plan was
never to operate it.’” — Andrew O’Hagan (The Satoshi Affair)
July 6, 2015: Craig’s final post on the Cloudcroft blog “CEO Update: The
Next 5 Years”.
Craig Wright, happy with the lock in of a few million that will lift the ATO
burden from his shoulders for a bit, immediately continues with his
supercomputer scam. As he writes:
“Despite issues with the ATO, Cloudcroft Supercomputers and its parent
group, DeMorgan Ltd, is happy to announce that things are back in full swing
as we have secured funding for the next five years to deliver our innovations
and solutions to market.”
“Ok, welcome! It’s been a little bit of a break. We’ve been doing our normal
battles and all the rest, and well, this week we are coming back to our normal
weekly reviews etc. So, an update is more more than anything else rather
than talking technology for this particular blog update. The companies are
now fully funded — that will go on for at least 5 years (hopefully a lot
longer). Details of that, well one day they will come out. What matters for
the moment is our ongoing typical battles with Tax office and other such
things are all taken care of — others can worry about them other than me.”
Fully funded… mwoah. That remains to be seen.
July 6, 2015: Craig’s lawyer Andrew Sommer terminates engagement.
Andrew Sommer, who had so far been representing Craig Wright for several
years in regards to his tax dealings with the ATO, terminates his engagement
with Craig and his companies with immediate effect. Let’s have a look how
that exactly went.
It’s best to follow the shocking line of events from the bottom of the
following email thread upwards. It starts with an email from ATO to Andrew
Sommer on July 3, 2015, explaining their damning findings about a handful
of forged emails.
When Andrew Sommer forwards the ATO email to Craig’s wife Ramona
Watts the next day, he notes “They have significantly more material than
this but they have allowed me to share this material with you as an
indicative sample to help you understand my position.”
As we know, and have showcased extensively in this series, “significantly
more material” would turn out not to be exactly an understatement.
Without further comment, Ramona then forwards the email thread to Craig.
Source: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536.510.12.pdf
“This is extremely serious. [..] I have no alternative but to cease acting
for DeMorgan Limited and Craig immediately. The letter will be issued
on Monday.”
In his email, we see Andrew’s urgent advice to Ramona: “I also believe that
this information should be provided to Stefan Matthews and Rob
Macgregor as a matter of urgency. In my view, it is appropriate for this
to come from you rather than from me.”. Now imagine, how likely is it that
Andrew’s urgent advice was followed up by Ramona, when Stefan and
Robert had just bailed out the couple for $15 million?
In his letter pictured below, Andrew Sommer gave as reason “integrity of
documents”, having been notified by the ATO that many emails presented by
Craig and intended to support the supposed legitimacy of his claims, those
sent to and received from several ATO employees, were found to be
forgeries of all kinds: backdated, never existed at all, or contained after-the-
fact edited content. Andrew had more-than-likely come to realise that his
client had been lying to both him and the ATO over a prolonged period of
time, and had been abusing him for endorsing Craig’s forgeries towards the
ATO in the process. The ATO notification was just the straw that broke the
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/511/1/kleiman-v-wright/
September 25, 2015: Craig shows frustration on Amazon.
Craig makes the comment “Always the assumption that SN must be a bloody
yank.” on Amazon, in a review of the book Digital Gold: The Untold Story of
Bitcoin by Nathaniel Popper.
It is obvious that Craig was not very amused that his hints and online
breadcrumbs were still not really working as intended, outside of his recent
score with once-fugitive gambling billionaire Calvin Ayre and co. He needs
this Satoshi charade to gain traction, an uninterested public or a skeptical
media will not do if he is to milk this new arrangement for all he can. There’s
no fool quite like an old fool, but even Calvin will need to be kept believing.
Craig has ‘work’ to do. Time for some serious measures, one would think?
September 25, 2015: Craig adjusts the “Bitcoin” blog forgery once more.
And we are treated with the next ‘Satoshi’ breadcrumb of Craig Wright. His
failed “Bitcoin” post in which he mistakenly announced Bitcoin Beta to go
live on January 11, 2009 (it was factually Bitcoin Alpha on January 3, 2009,
while the first Bitcoin client could be downloaded on January 9, 2009
already) gets another obfuscation treatment:
“Update, 25 Sept 2015
It does always surprise me how at times the best place to hide it right in the
open.”
Sources: https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/674365203287572480
https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/674365467100884992
As Nathaniel mentions, the ‘dox’ email claimed massive bitcoin expenditure
by Wright’s companies as supposed proof he was Satoshi but the ATO’s
investigation at the time was showing this to be a lie, meaning the ‘dox’
documents were just as fabricated as Craig’s tax rebate claims.
September — November 2015
Around the same time that Craig apparently unleashed his self-dox
campaign, another forgery “I mined Bitcoin in the past and write code.” ,
pops up in the header of Craig’s private blog “Cracked, inSecure and
Generally Broken”.
Header “I mined Bitcoin in the past and write code” is not visible on a September 22, 2015 snapshot, but becomes
visible on a November 22, 2015 snapshot. This indicates when Craig created this forgery.
November 2015: What happened with Tulip Trading’s C01N
supercomputer?
Referring to the already critical notes made by the ATO found under
December 6, 2013 in “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”, we are sure it
will come as no surprise to anyone that ATO finally also rejected everything
related to this C01N supercomputer.
Look for quotes like:
“Duplicates of serial numbers and UUIDs were observed and the fact that
they are also obfuscated, and appear to have been taken from an internet
source, makes them unconvincing proof of the existence of the purported
C01N supercomputer”
“The specifications for the purported C01N supercomputer provided by Dr
Wright to the ATO are not consistent with each other nor with those listed on
the Top500 Website. Again this information appears unreliable”
“we conclude that the taxpayer did not have access to the purported
supercomputer. Given Dr Wright’s extensive IT qualifications, it is
inconceivable that he was unaware of this fact. We therefore conclude the
evidence provided to us was manufactured by the taxpayer in an
attempt to deceive us”
After entering the supercomputer Top500 list in November 2014 on #64
(see Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2), then in June 2015 the Tulip
Trading/C01N system was ranked #15, while in November 2015 it was
ranked #17 on the Top500 website. However, most these ‘ranks’ can only be
looked up with help of WayBack Machine, as the Top500 website has
deleted almost all Craig Wright related supercomputer entries from their
website. Computerworld Netherlands explains on June 20, 2016:
“One much-publicized computer you won’t find in the Top500 rankings any
more is Tulip Trading’s C01N. Allegedly built by self-styled bitcoin inventor
Craig Wright, C01N [Note that this entry is still, confusing many, visible on
the top500 website] entered the rankings in 64th place in November 2014,
jumping to 15th place in June 2015 following a claimed upgrade.
“When doubts about this system surfaced, we tried to independently
verify its existence, but ultimately could not,” Top500 list maintainer
Erich Strohmaier said via email.
C01N initially made it into the November 2015 ranking, in 17th place.
“We meant to remove it at that time, but it fell through the cracks for a while.
It should get removed from all lists, but older lists get much less attention
(and care) than the newest,” Strohmaier wrote. C01N was removed from the
November 2015 rankings some time in May [2016], cached copies of the list
show, with machines below it all moving up a rank.”
And Craig Wright? He still pretends a nose bleed when asked about the
supercomputers in April 2019, and at the same time he conveniently forgets
about the Sukuriputo Okane supercomputer that also failed to get approval
from the ATO, as it didn’t exist either…
“Q: When did you have a supercomputer?
A: Back in 2013. Sorry, end of 2012, but it was not working. 2013, 2014,
2015.
Q: What was it called?
A: Tulip and C01N. There were two.
Q: So, you did have a supercomputer called C01N?
A: That is what I just said.
Q: When did you get rid of these supercomputers?
A: I did not.
Q: You still have them?
A: I do not have them.
Q: Who has them?
A: I do not know.
Q: What happened to them at the end of 2015?
A: I do not know.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright (deposition April 4, 2019)
November 2, 2015: Craig Wright is being ignored on Twitter.
Craig’s Twitter account before he used “ProfFaustus” as his handle was
“Dr_Craig_Wright”. Here seen in a hilarious, desperate attempt to reach out
to Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream (a well known Bitcoin infrastructure
company) and mentioned by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper in
the ‘References’ section with his paper “Hashcash — a denial of service
counter-measure”, dated 2002, as inspiration for the mere existence of
Bitcoin.
Adam, however, largely ignored Craig’s repeated attempts to draw him into
responding to these tweets as, according to later recollection, he’d already
dismissed him due to the persistently incoherent nonsense Craig had
previously spouted about Bitcoin-related subjects in other discussion
threads.
You can see how Craig is boasting about the claimed performance of a
supercomputer which was ultimately proven to not even exist. Clearly, he
still wants to try and show the ATO, and his gullible new investor bailing him
out for $15,000,000 (USD), that he is a respected peer within the Bitcoin
intelligentsia. Someone who might, indeed, be Satoshi.
He was, and is, neither.
November 12, 2015: Media start receiving Craig’s dox package.
Leah Goodman of Newsweek, who unsuccessfully ‘revealed’ Dorian
Nakamoto as Satoshi Nakamoto in March 2014, is one of the first to receive
the package of information that is supposed to prove that Craig Wright is the
inventor of Bitcoin. On December 10, 2015 (just after the publication of the
Wired and Gizmodo articles) she tweeted the screenshot that will be shown
in a bit.
But is it a coincidence that the email appears to be written by Craig Wright
himself, AND the fact that on this same day the further foundations were laid
for the May 2016 signing sessions debacle? Andrew O’Hagan describes this
day in “The Satoshi Affair” as follows:
“On Thursday, 12 November [2015], I turned up at MacGregor’s office near
Oxford Circus, where I signed in under a pseudonym and made my way to a
boardroom wallpapered with mathematical formulae. MacGregor came into
the room wearing a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket
square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but
looked about 29. There was something studied about him — the Alexander
McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio — and I’d never met anyone who
spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point
of the whole exercise he said it was simple: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some
zeroes.’
MacGregor described Wright to me as ‘the goose that lays the golden egg’.
He said that if I agreed to take part I would have exclusive access to the
whole story, and to everyone around Wright, and that it would all end with
Wright proving he was Satoshi by using cryptographic keys that only Satoshi
had access to, those associated with the very first blocks in the blockchain.
MacGregor told me this might happen at a public TED talk. He said it would
be ‘game over’. Wright’s patents would then be sold and Wright could get on
with his life, out of the public eye. ‘All he wants is peace to get on with his
work,’ MacGregor told me at that first meeting. ‘And how this ends, for me, is
with Craig working for, say, Google, with a research staff of four hundred.’”
Did this meeting between Andrew and Robert trigger Craig, who knew he
can’t sign anything Bitcoin related, to ramp up his efforts to be ‘revealed’ as
Satoshi Nakamoto earlier so he wouldn’t have to go through with the signing
sessions? Or is it a stretch to suggest that he was also very desperate to
‘prove’ to the ATO that he was in fact the creator of Bitcoin?
One can certainly try to make educated guesses about Craig’s motivations
around this day, but there is hardly any doubt that the only person initially
benefitting mostly of the Satoshi dox, is Craig himself. Only when the dox
package was publicly exposed as a treasure box of conflicting information
and backdated forgeries, Craig desperately started to try find all kinds of
lame excuses about hacking ex-staff, the Anonymous group hacking him
since 2011, Blockstream employees hacking him, and at some point in 2021
he even suggested that Ira Kleiman (brother of late Dave Kleiman, who
started a fraud lawsuit against Craig Wright) was behind the hacking of his
computer network, the altering of his documents and subsequent doxing of
his ‘Satoshiness’ to Wired/Gizmodo!
As Leah McGrath Goodman said, in reply to Nathaniel Popper’s December
tweet about having received the ‘dox’ package (below) in October, “We all
got it. It was being shopped around fairly aggressively this autumn.”
Source: https://twitter.com/truth_eater/status/674788036752879616
November 19, 2015: Patrick Paige contacts Craig Wright about “a
reporter”.
It appears that reporters are starting to inquire about the dox package. But
this email from Patrick Paige (Dave Kleiman’s training officer in the army,
with who he later started Computer Forensics LLC) is interesting for another
tidbit also: Craig claims that Dave Kleiman helped him set up the first
supercomputer. You know, that NONEXISTENT supercomputer.
November 27, 2015: Craig accuses the ATO of doctoring emails.
It appears that after his tax lawyer, Andrew Sommer, had promptly
terminated his engagement with Craig and his companies, following the
revelation about the faked ‘evidence’ used to support his version of events,
Craig tried to strike back at the ATO about the email forgeries that they
discovered, and to obfuscate the fact that the person who had been
massively doctoring and forging so far, was Craig himself.
The reader might remember we discussed a few bits and pieces in
“Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1” of a Craig Wright puff piece from
Murray Distributed Technologies called “Forensic Report Raises Questions
about Australian Tax Office’s Handling of Craig Wright Probe”. What we
did not properly address yet, was their section that starts with:
“We have exclusively obtained two Computer Forensics Reports performed
on behalf of Wright’s company Demorgan Ltd where computer forensics
expert Dr. Nick Sharples and digital forensics expert Alan Batey were
independently appointed to examine email messages used in the ATO’s
probe of Wright. These emails were used as evidence in the continuing
audits and probes of Wright’s business dealings that culminated in the ATO
raid on his Australian residence in December 2015, one day after Wired
published an article accusing him of being one of the people behind the
Satoshi Nakamoto team.”
What Murray Distributed Technologies didn’t realize, and of course weren’t
told either by their exclusive source (it’s probably not overly speculative to
think that Craig Wright himself was this ‘exclusive’ source), was that the ATO
had already thoroughly debunked these reports of Sharples and Batey,
which they apparently received on November 27, 2015, as described in their
ATO’s Reasons for Decision for C01n Pty Ltd report, issued early 2016.
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/7/kleiman-v-wright/
Every single point above thoroughly exposes a litany of Craig’s fakes,
forgeries and frauds, if you scanned past it, do please go back and give it a
proper read, it is legitimately fascinating to see how the ATO experts
dismantle his lies again and again.
But, below, is the final nail in his ‘Sharples and Batey’ distraction:
The coup de grâce delivered so exquisitely by the ATO investigators above,
was that the very emails Craig had provided Sharples and Batey with, in
order to have them analysed to supposedly prove the ATO had doctored
their evidence… had either not originated from the ATO in the first place, or
were altered versions of legitimate ATO emails!
To put it in soccer parlance, Craig’s sham ‘investigation’ had scored ‘an own
goal’!
November 29/30, 2015: Craig Wright makes an appearance on an All-Star
Panel of Bitcoin OGs (to a perplexed audience).
It is at this point that ‘Bitcoin Belle’ has decided to crowbar an appearance
by Craig, albeit via Skype, on a panel of well-known Bitcoin personalities for
a Las Vegas conference, apparently believing that his personality, intellect
and expertise on the subject will shine through and show him to be the very
embodiment of a potential ‘Satoshi’ candidate.
It does not.
From the outset to 00:02:46 we see the cringe-worthy way in which Bitcoin
Belle (Michelle Seven) desperately tries to coax something coherently-
Bitcoin-related out of Craig to explain to the audience why he is even
included in this event. He seems to think that mumbling something hand-
wavy about his myriad academic credentials and ‘research no-one ever
hears about’, will suffice. Michelle ends up having to actually interrupt his
vapid spiel to ask him to say who he is as nobody at the conference knows
him and even prompts with, “are you a computer scientists, are you a
miner?”, t o w hic h h e ent irel y m isse s the ma rk by repl yi ng, “I’m a bit of
everything, I have a masters in law…I have a master in statistics…a couple of
doctorates…” before finally being explicitly asked to say how he first learned
of Bitcoin, leading him to, again, respond with more vague allusion about
how he has “been involved in this for a long time…I try and stay…I keep my
head down”, l ead in g M ich ell e to f in all y a sk hi m d irec tl y, “were you a miner?”,
to which he just responds after an extended pause, “a long time ago”.
It is obvious that Craig is desperately wanting to avoid having to overtly
imply that he is claiming to be ‘Satoshi’ in front of both an OG panel and an
educated audience containing actual experts in the Bitcoin field, who could
possibly lead to him being exposed as the fraud he is should he be
challenged on such a topic. But he has time yet, so far he just wants to be
included for the benefit of his doubters, the ATO, and his backers, Calvin
Ayre and co.
At 00:33:20 he’s back to waffling about doing ‘computing’ in Iceland, on his
(NONEXISTENT, remember?) supercomputer called ‘Tulip’ before launching
into a tedious tale about the history of Tulips and the associated ‘Tulip
Bubble’ which he asserts was a ‘swaption not a bubble’, before finally
claiming at 00:35:35 that the ‘computing’ in Iceland, on his (NONEXISTENT,
remember?) supercomputer called ‘Tulip’, is all about Bitcoin ‘scalability’.
Craig even goes as far as to shamelessly mentioning that his
(NONEXISTENT, remember?) supercomputer was “№15 in the top 500
supercomputers globally.”
Now let this sink in for a moment. Craig Wright doesn’t have a
supercomputer, but is there on a fifteen-foot video screen, talking over
Skype about all the Bitcoin-related work he is doing, in Iceland, on a
supercomputer that only existed in his dreams… and on forged invoices paid
with nonexistent Bitcoin to advance a multi-million tax scam in Australia.
A nonexistent supercomputer, by the way, which was only called ‘Tulip
Trading’ because that was simply the name of the ready-made ‘shelf
company’ Craig bought from the Seychelles formation agent previously, that
he claimed to the ATO acts as a Trust for a vast wealth in equally-
NONEXISTENT bitcoins, you know, for his blatant multi-million-dollar tax
fraud their investigators keep exposing!
In any event, this attempted introduction of Craig Wright to the wider Bitcoin
community can only be marked as being a total dud. He failed to capture
anyone’s interest and merely ended up providing some amusement to Nick
Szabo part-way through with a stubborn and willfully erroneous insistence
that Bitcoin is ‘Turing complete’.
December 8, 2015: Wired and Gizmodo articles, suggesting Craig Wright
might be Satoshi Nakamoto.
With the ‘dox’ email package having been sent around to multiple journalists
and news outlets in the preceding months — most recipients being wholly
unimpressed and unconvinced by the effort — two outlets are intrigued
enough to look deeper into their contents and engage with some of the
people cited within to fact-check what is claimed.
Calls and emails to professionals who feature in transcripts of the many ATO
meetings are, understandably, answered in the affirmative. Yes, these
meetings took place and, yes, the contents are an accurate representation
of what was discussed.
What is not understood by the Wired and Gizmodo journalists at the time is
that of course these specific events are true! Craig *did* have meetings with
the ATO where Bitcoin was frequently discussed. As did his tax lawyers who
explicitly spoke about his supposed extensive trove of bitcoin from having
mined coins since 2009 because, as we have already clarified for you in
Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2, these were statements made by
respected professionals ENTIRELY-PREMISED on what Craig had told them
verbally and which he’d evidenced through a litany of fraudulent filings and
faked backdated contracts and emails. Andrew Sommer spoke on record to
the ATO in a meeting held in 2014 about Craig having ‘commenced mining in
2009’ but there still remains, to this day, no evidence to suggest this is even
remotely true.
The ‘dox’ package contained an extensive collection of official 2013/2014
ATO transcripts and correspondence BECAUSE he was being investigated
by them after having claimed record-setting GST and R&D cash rebates on
the strength of supposed massive bitcoin-based business payments and
receipts he could provide no legitimate evidence for so, OF COURSE there
was plenty of discussion about Craig Wright and Bitcoin, they were on to the
fact it was all a fraudulent scam by that point!
Alongside the fact-checking the journalists had conducted with key figures,
there were what appeared to be an extensive collection of contracts, emails
and electronic signatures directly linking Craig Wright to Satoshi Nakamoto,
it was just too tempting to hold off for much longer on breaking their scoop.
Wired and Gizmodo had both heard of each other’s intention to publish their
findings outing Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto, apparently prompting
both to rush to get the lead on the other and possibly explaining their failure
to fully vet the ‘evidence’ sufficiently. The results were all-too predictable.
First out of the gate was Wired, followed a few hours later by Gizmodo, with
both breathlessly citing the ‘compelling and perplexing’ new evidence which
they claimed had been corroborated through interviews.
This would have been everything Craig Wright could have hoped for at this
point. Both the disbelieving ATO investigators and his deep-pocketed new
financial backer would see the world forced to acknowledge his rightful
claim to the Bitcoin ‘throne’. His tax problems would be behind him and a
bright future staking claim to the huge ‘Satoshi Stash’ lay ahead.
Craig Steven Wright and Dave Kleiman were named as the men involved in
the very development of Bitcoin — Yes, Satoshi had been unmasked!
Cue our wry narrator, please.
Narrator: No, Satoshi had not been unmasked.
A rightly-skeptical response from the wider Bitcoin community debunking
these exposés was as damning as it was swift.
Outside of the actually-legitimate-but-out-of-context ATO transcripts,
myriad emails, pgp keys, domains and documents, which were supposed to
directly link Craig Wright to both Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto, were
publicly proven to be faked and often poorly-executed fakes at that. Both
outlets had fallen for the apparent volume of evidence, rather than its
quality.
The derision came thick and fast.
Due to the backlash to the articles, exposing that both Wired and Gizmodo
had not done appropriate indepth due diligence on the material they
received, they quickly started to backtrack on their suggestions that Craig
Wright might be the inventor of Bitcoin together with his deceased partner
Dave Kleiman. Several follow up articles were published, and Wired, for
example, not only updated their article within days, to detail the flawed
evidence, but added an additional Editor’s Note in 2019 explaining that
Craig’s own public attempts to prove himself as Satoshi had likewise been
exposed as faked, too.
“EDITOR’S NOTE, 4/30/2019: In the days following publication of this story,
WIRED published an update that identified inconsistencies in the evidence
supporting the notion that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright later
came forward to claim that he was indeed the creator of Bitcoin, but offered
some evidence that appeared to be fraudulent. This piece has been updated
to clarify Wright’s claims, and the headline has been changed to make clear
that WIRED no longer believes Wright is likely to be the creator of Bitcoin.”
And Gizmodo retracted in a follow up publication “The Mystery of Craig
Wright and Bitcoin Isn’t Solved Yet”:
“And several outlets have done even more digging to try and figure out
whether Wright and Kleiman were, in fact, closely involved in creating
Bitcoin.
Some of those pieces have been excellent. Several of them revealed
valuable information about Wright in particular that merits close examination.
Few, if any, acknowledge that outside of the document dump, Craig Wright
has been telling people for over a year that he was involved in creating
Bitcoin. None have proved anything conclusive about whether he was telling
the truth. Below, briefly, is the collected evidence that he wasn’t:
We now know, thanks to Sarah Jeong at Motherboard, that a set of PGP
keys (referenced in the apparent draft of a trust agreement wherein
Wright hands off 1.1 million bitcoin to Kleiman) seem to be backdated —
created after 2008 and then modified to give the appearance of an
earlier origin date.
In a similar vein, several reporters have uncovered evidence that Wright
was drafting something of a digital revisionist history: he appears to
have modified blog posts and social media accounts to insert
references to Bitcoin where none had previously existed.
A sharp-eyed reader also noted to Gizmodo that according to
registration information, a domain shown in one of Wright’s apparent
emails to Kleiman was created months after March 2008, the date on
the message, which could indicate a forgery. (The URL — “information-
defense.com” — appears on a list of domains pending expiration in May
2008, pointing to the likelihood that its registration lapsed and was later
renewed, which would explain the discrepancy.)
Charles Sturt University, where Wright claimed on his LinkedIn account
to have obtained a PhD, said in a statement that he received two
Master’s degrees but not a doctorate. And the existence of two
supercomputers that Wright’s company, Cloudcroft, claimed to own, is
under question.
Finally, two days after the articles were published, an email appearing to
originate from a known Satoshi account was posted to the bitcoin-dev
mailing list. “I am not Craig Wright,” it read. “We are all Satoshi.” But as
the Guardian and others have pointed out, the likelihood that that email
was forged is not small.”
Now let irony have it that “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1” mentioned
the media outlet The Conversation, where Craig Wright happily posted 5
articles and 112 comments (in which he casually mentioned Bitcoin a few
times) in 2011, and now in Part 3 we see an entry of The Conversation again.
As they wrote on December 9, 2015 in response to the Wired and Gizmodo
articles that were published the day before: “Have journalists found the
inventor of Bitcoin or simply been duped?”. Wh at fo llows is an an alys is of
Craig’s behavior in 2011 on their platform:
“We actually have specific evidence that Craig Wright is very unlikely to be
Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2011, Wright wrote several articles for The
Conversation. They were all around the area of cybersecurity but Wright was
also a prolific commenter on both his own and others’ articles. The
comments are largely spoken with a voice of authority and are largely
combative in nature. In 112 comments, Wright mentions Bitcoin only once, at
the end of a very long list of financial alternatives to PayPal. He said:
Source: https://theconversation.com/lulzsec-anonymous-freedom-fighters-or-the-new-face-of-evil-
2605#comment_6162
For someone who allegedly invented Bitcoin, he was unable to spell the
currency correctly. He didn’t even name it as the first alternative to PayPal.
He suggested Google Checkout as the most likely digital payment system to
replace PayPal’s dominance in the electronic payment space.”
Not only do we see Craig being very ignorant about Bitcoin here, we also
find, again, another important clue about Craig’s background: “They were
all around the area of cybersecurity”. Al t ho ugh Cra ig de spe rate ly tri ed to
rewrite history in later years by backdating his involvement with coding,
cryptography, payment systems and decentralized peer-to-peer networks,
fact is: Craig’s sole expertise till his Bitcoin fraud started in the second half
of 2013, quickly followed by a — first careful, later more obvious — Satoshi
Nakamoto cosplay starting early 2014, was in the relatively unrelated fields
of Information Technology and Cybersecurity.
As Gizmodo went on to say, “Craig Wright acts in the manner of someone
who either believes that he invented Bitcoin or badly wants someone else to
believe it, and he’s been acting that way for a long time.”
In that you’ve seen the objective evidence the ATO uncovered, detailing
Craig’s endless trail of lies and forgeries throughout his multi-million-dollar
cash rebate fraud, you know full well who the ‘someone’ is that he’s been
trying to convince from the very start of his Satoshi cosplay.
With the sheen rapidly fading from his crown, following the revelations that
it’s all a con-job, the pretender-to-the-throne is seeing his glorious
coronation being roundly mocked and ridiculed within hours of the articles
and the ‘evidence’ being posted.
Seeing a growing wave of online sleuths eager to dig up his past and
possibly reveal even more about his Potemkin-village charade of ‘front’
companies forming the basis for his rebate fraud, he takes action to conceal
what he can.
December 9, 2015: Craig Wright scrubs all online presence.
From YouTube to personal blogs, from business websites (see DeMorgan
Ltd example below) to LinkedIn and Twitter, nothing survives Craig’s digital
sledgehammer.
At some point, while Craig was rushed to London, even Stefan Matthews
helped deleting everything Craig Wright on the internet:
“When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him up. They went to Stefan’s
apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes while he set up his laptops
on the dining-room table. They spent the rest of Saturday wiping his
remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any contact to be possible:
he wanted to cut Wright off from the world.” — Andrew O’Hagan “The
Source: https://archive.ph/fMnc8
This is a good moment to summarize all the companies that we currently
know Craig possessed in this timeframe (there might be a few more we
don’t know about yet, though), and how they went along in the upcoming
years. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that all the companies
in the screenshot above — mostly empty paper-only vehicles to advance
Craig’s Australian tax fraud — do not exist anymore. In fact, NONE of the 22
companies listed here exist anymore!
Information Defense (raised 2009, dismantled 2017)
Integyrs (raised 2009, dismantled 2015)
- Not to be confused with Integyrz
Greyfog (raised 2009, dismantled 2014)
Cloudcroft (raised 2011, raided & put under ATO’s External
Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
Panopticrypt (raised 2011, raided & put under ATO’s External
Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
Strasan (raised 2011, renamed to C01n in 2014, raided & put under
ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
Coin-Exch (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External
Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence (raised 2013, bankrupt 2014,
dismantled 2017)
Integyrz (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration
2015, dismantled 2020)
Interconnected Research (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s
External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
Pholus (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration
2015, dismantled 2020)
Denariuz (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External
Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
Zuhl (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration
2015, dismantled 2020)
Hotwire PE Employee Share Plan (raised 2013, dismantled 2018)
Chaos And Nonlinear Forecastability In Economics And Finance (raised
2014, dismantled 2018)
Daso (raised 2014, dismantled 2017)
DeMorgan Holdings (raised 2014, dismantled 2017)
DeMorgan Ltd (raised 2014, dismantled 2017)
Misfits Games (raised 2014, dismantled 2018)
Ezas (raised 2014, dismantled 2019)
Denariuz Ltd (UK) (raised as empty shelf company in 2012 by CFS,
obtained as such by Craig under the name “Permanent Success” who
immediately renamed to Denariuz Ltd in 2014, dismantled 2017)
C01n Ltd (UK) (raised as empty shelf company in 2012 by CFS,
obtained as such by Craig under the name “Moving Forward In
Business” who immediately renamed to C01n Ltd in 2014, dismantled
2017)
On purpose, the two ‘famous’ Seychelles companies (Tulip Trading Ltd &
Wright International Investments Ltd) that Craig Wright still owns are not in
this list. As far as we know, these two companies still exist, have not been
dissolved from the Seychelles company registries, and — by means of
backdated forgeries, fraudulent bookkeeping and non-existing encrypted
files between its assets(*) — still form the current installment of the
infamous Tulip Trust with which Craig Wright is still annoyingly scamming
the Bitcoin industry.
(*) as determined by the ATO during their very thorough tax fraud inquiry as
we know by now, furthermore as determined by Court Florida in 2019 during
the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.
December 9, 2015: the ATO raid on Craig’s house and offices.
The ATO are making their move and have sent agents and law enforcement
to arrest Craig and seize evidence related to their multi-year investigation
into his fraudulent tax rebate scam. An ill-informed media will spin it as
‘Satoshi’ being hounded following his being ‘outed’ in the two articles, but
that is not why they are looking for Craig Steven Wright.
As would be clarified in a ‘The Weekend Australian’ piece, January 20, 2016,
the ATO, “firmly believe Craig Wright is not [Satoshi Nakamoto] the
creator of Bitcoin, and that he may have created the hoax to distract
from his tax issues”.
Meanwhile, Andrew O’Hagan would go on to describe the day of the ATO
raids as being something more akin to a spy-chase scene from a fictional
thriller, in his long form article The Satoshi Affair.
“Ten men raided a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30
p.m. on Wednesday, 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore
shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued
under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named
Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns
Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation
Office. Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of
companies associated with cryptocurrency and online security. As one set of
agents scoured his kitchen cupboards and emptied out his garage, another
entered his main company headquarters at 32 Delhi Road in North Ryde.
They were looking for ‘originals or copies’ of material held on hard drives and
computers; they wanted bank statements, mobile phone records, research
papers and photographs. The warrant listed dozens of companies whose
papers were to be scrutinised, and 32 individuals, some with alternative
names, or alternative spellings. The name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ appeared
sixth from the bottom of the list.
Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was
friendly but he was weird — to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’
— and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power:
Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back
of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his ‘toys’, but the
real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand
miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day
before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed,
had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were
calling ‘the deal’. Stefan immediately moved Wright and his wife into a luxury
apartment at the Meriton World Tower in Sydney. They’d soon be moving to
England anyway, and all parties agreed it was best to hide out for now.
At 32 Delhi Road, the palm trees were throwing summer shade onto the
concrete walkways — ‘Tailor Made Office Solutions’, it said on a nearby
billboard — and people were drinking coffee in Deli 32 on the ground floor.
Wright’s office on level five was painted red, and looked down on the
Macquarie Park Cemetery, known as a place of calm for the living as much
as the dead. No one was sure what to do when the police entered. The staff
were gathered in the middle of the room and told by the officers not to go
near their computers or use their phones. ‘I tried to intervene,’ one senior
staff member, a Dane called Allan Pedersen, remarked later, ‘and said we
would have to call our lawyers.’
Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters
were sniffing at a strange story — a story too complicated for her to explain
— so she just told everyone that damp in the Gordon house had forced them
to move out. The place they moved into, a tall apartment building, was right
in the city and Wright felt as if he was on holiday. On 9 December, after their
first night in the new apartment, Wright woke up to the news that two
articles, one on the technology site Gizmodo, the other in the tech magazine
Wired, had come out overnight fingering him as the person behind the
pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2008 published a white paper
describing a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ — a technology Satoshi
went on to develop as bitcoin. Reading the articles on his laptop, Wright
knew his old life was over.
By this point, cameras and reporters were outside his former home and his
office. They had long heard rumours, but the Gizmodo and Wired stories had
sent the Australian media into a frenzy. It wasn’t clear why the police and the
articles had appeared on the same day. At about five that same afternoon, a
receptionist called from the lobby of Wright’s apartment building to say that
the police had arrived. Ramona turned to Wright and told him to get the hell
out. He looked at a desk in front of the window: there were two large laptop
computers on it — they weighed a few kilos each, with 64 gigabytes of RAM
— and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took
Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door.
They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be
coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there
were office suites and a swimming pool. He stood frozen for a minute before
he realised he’d rushed out without his passport.
Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to
the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding
the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed
into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway
heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where
she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and
decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went to his workplace and
took his phone, telling him she couldn’t explain because she didn’t want to
get him involved.
Meanwhile, Wright was still standing beside the swimming pool in his suit,
with a laptop in his arms. He heard people coming up the stairs, sped down
the corridor and ducked into the gents. A bunch of teenagers were standing
around but seemed not to notice him. He went to the furthest cubicle and
deliberately kept the door unlocked. (He figured the police would just look
for an engaged sign.) He was standing on top of the toilet when he heard the
officers come in. They asked the youngsters what they were doing, but they
said ‘nothing’ and the police left. Wright stayed in the cubicle for a few
minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the
service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone.
She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him
again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He
went down sixty flights of stairs to the car park in the basement, unlocked
his car and opened the boot, where he lifted out the spare wheel and put his
laptop in the wheel cavity. He drove towards the Harbour Bridge and got lost
in the traffic.
As Ramona drove along she began texting the mysterious Stefan, who was
at Sydney Airport, having already checked in for a flight to Manila, where he
lived. Stefan had to make a fuss to get his bag removed from the plane and
then he spoke to Ramona, telling her that Wright would have to get out of the
country. She didn’t argue. She called the Flight Centre and asked what
flights were leaving. ‘To where?’ asked the saleswoman.
‘Anywhere,’ Ramona said. Within ten minutes she had booked her husband
on a flight to Auckland.
In the early evening, Wright, scared and lost, made his way to Chatswood.
He texted Ramona to come and meet him, and she immediately texted back
saying he should go straight to the airport. She’d booked him a flight. ‘But I
don’t have my passport,’ he said. Ramona was afraid she’d be arrested if she
returned to their apartment, but her friend said he’d go into the building and
get the passport. They waited until the police left the building, then he went
upstairs. A few minutes later he came back with the passport, along with the
other computer and a power supply.
They met Wright in the airport car park. Ramona had never seen him so
worried. ‘I was shocked,’ he later said. ‘I hadn’t expected to be outed like that
in the media, and then to be chased down by the police. Normally, I’d be
prepared. I’d have a bag packed.’ As Ramona gave him the one-way ticket to
Auckland, she was anxious about when she would see him again. Wright said
New Zealand was a bit too close and wondered what to do about money.
Ramona went to an ATM and gave him $600. He bought a yellow bag from
the airport shop in which to store his computers. He had no clothes. ‘It was
awful saying goodbye to him,’ Ramona said.
In the queue for security, he felt nervous about his computers. His flight was
about to close when the security staff flagged him down. He was being
taken to an interview room when an Indian man behind him started going
berserk. It was just after the Paris bombings; the man’s wife was wearing a
sari and the security staff wanted to pat her down. The man objected. All the
security staff ran over to deal with the situation and told Wright to go. He
couldn’t believe his luck. He put his head down and scurried through the
lounge.
Back at Wright’s office, Allan Pedersen was being interviewed by the police.
He overheard one of them ask: ‘Have we got Wright yet?’
‘He’s just hopped a flight to New Zealand,’ his colleague said.
Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the
programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by
unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the storyline strangely
comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone.
At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to
use the airport’s wifi to Skype with Stefan, using a new account. They had a
discussion about how to get him to Manila. There was a big rock concert that
night in Auckland, and all the hotels were full, but he crossed town in a cab
and managed to get a small room at the Hilton. He booked two nights, using
cash. He knew how to get more cash out of ATMs than the daily limit, so he
worked several machines near the hotel, withdrawing $5000. He ordered
room service that night and the next morning went to the Billabong store in
Queen Street to buy some clothes. He felt agitated, out of his element:
normally he would wear a suit and tie — he enjoys the notion that he is too
well dressed to be a geek — but he bought a T-shirt, a pair of jeans and
some socks. On the way back to the hotel he got a bunch of SIM cards, so
that his calls wouldn’t be monitored. Back at the Hilton he was packing up
his computers when the dependable Stefan came on Skype. He told Wright
to go to the airport and pick up a ticket he’d left him for a flight to Manila. His
picture was all over the papers, along with the story that he was trying to
escape.
Within hours of Wright’s name appearing in the press, anonymous messages
threatened to reveal his ‘actual history’. Some said he had been on Ashley
Madison, the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been
seen on Grindr, the gay hook-up app. During a six-hour layover in Hong
Kong, he killed his email accounts and tried to wipe his social media profile,
which he knew would be heavy with information he wasn’t keen to publicise:
‘Mainly rants,’ he said later. When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him
up. They went to Stefan’s apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes
while he set up his laptops on the dining-room table. They spent the rest of
Saturday wiping his remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any
contact to be possible: he wanted to cut Wright off from the world. The next
day he put him on a plane to London.” — Andrew O’Hagan “The Satoshi
Affair”
No.
Exciting stuff, indeed! Satoshi being outed and having to go to extraordinary
lengths to avoid being captured and interrogated, possibly even extradited
to unfriendly jurisdictions and charged with drug and terrorism offences
over the claimed illicit use of his revolutionary invention, Bitcoin…the movie
rights alone would surely be snapped up in an instant by Hollywood!
Except, no, there wasn’t a single person in a position of legal authority who
genuinely thought Craig was Satoshi Nakamoto. The whole edge-of-the-
seat retelling of his frantic ‘escape from Oz’ is laughable upon reflection for
its whole cloak-and-dagger tale of Craig hiding in toilets and getting lost in
his rental car and his wife dinging hers into the car park barrier.
Oh, he was fleeing alright, and it was pretty hectic, albeit less ‘Mission
Impossible’ and more ‘Mr Bean’.
Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean) as Johnny English, British super-spy
His reason for evading the authorities, however, is far less glamorous than
the spy-thriller-esque narrative suggested by Andrew O’Hagan.
Outtro
Craig now would have you believe that he fled Australia because of him
being unfairly persecuted by the ATO, that they were hounding him because
he is Satoshi.
The truth is that the ATO raided his home and offices for the very fact that
they knew he was not Satoshi. In that their evidence had already shown that
he was lying about being Satoshi, this meant the claimed source of his
hundreds-of-millions-dollars in business transactions, predicated on his
ownership of the ‘Satoshi Stash’, was a lie, too.
These aren’t small matters of a ‘disagreement’ with the tax authorities or, as
Craig repeatedly has claimed in the years since, that they were solely
concerned with imposing an unfair tax burden on his bitcoin holdings. No,
these are extremely serious offences involving defrauding the coffers of the
Australian tax-payer and having money paid to his own businesses in
fraudulent GST and R&D rebates, again and again, for ever-larger amounts,
running into tens of millions of dollars.
Craig would have you believe that he has ‘settled’ this matter, that he paid
the various penalties, fines and judgements imposed following the ATO’s
audits and investigations.
This isn’t true, either.
There is no ‘settling’ of criminal fraud of this scale outside of a served prison
sentence. This isn’t hyperbole, this is already-set precedent in the Australian
legal system.
And please make no mistake, these ATO inquiries can last over a decade. In
2018, “Former Perth financier Gary Parsons jailed after half a million
dollar ATO rebates” was only brought to justice after an investigation of no
less than 11 years.
“A former Perth financier who ripped off more than half a million dollars from
the Australian Taxation Office by lodging false GST rebate applications has
been jailed for five years.
Gary Andrew Parsons, 53, was extradited to Perth from the US in January
last year after an 11-year investigation by the Australian Federal Police and
the ATO.”
So, as you can see, the old adage is very true, “The wheels of justice turn
slowly, but grind exceedingly fine” and Gary Parsons was found guilty of a
mere fraction of what Craig Steven Wright is potentially facing being
prosecuted for.
Criminally prosecuted?
Ah, yes, meet Melanie Johnston, one of the ATO’s Criminal Investigators. In
June 2018 she contacted Vel Freedman and Kyle Roche, senior members of
Ira Kleiman’s counsel in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, and announced she
was “conducting a criminal investigation relating to Craig Steven
WRIGHT.” for which she requested to speak with Mr [Ira] Kleiman.
Source: https://twitter.com/MyLegacyKit/status/1267702815897591808 (Hold. My. Beer.)
To summarize, Craig Wright is facing serious legal jeopardy, as he always
has been since the very first cash rebates were filed back in 2009 so he
could claim to have sold ‘valuable’ Intellectual Property to his own
businesses, all the way through to his doubling and tripling and 100X’ing-
down on the scale of his rebate claims once he discovered he could simply
claim them as being based, not on provable bank transfers or payments, but
on him just pointing to publicly-viewable high-value bitcoin wallets and
simply saying to the tax authorities, “Those are mine”.
He had hoped that the more convoluted he made the explanations, the very
tangled-web he wove of fake contracts, emails and even a few instances of
successfully lying to the Supreme Court in a sham ‘recovery action’, would
eventually convince the pesky Australian Taxation Office to back down and
leave him with his illicit loot.
But they have demonstrated an admirable level of tenacity and exceptional
competency in not being bowed by his attempts to ‘baffle with bullshit’ and,
as it all has been laid out for you to see in this three-part magnum opus of
Craig’s Crooked Connivings, they know exactly what the truth is.
As of publishing, we are just about to witness Craig in a court case of his
own making in Miami, Florida, where his lies to the estate of the Kleiman
family have led to them suing for recovery of the supposed fortune in Bitcoin
and IP that his trail of falsified-for-the-benefit-of-the-ATO documents and
legal actions conjured up. That this can actually be used against him now in
something of a, “Well, this blew up in your face, Craig” moment just typifies
the nature of his ever-morphing timeline of years of deception and fraud. His
own claims of a fantastical wealth he and his dead friend shared mean that
they’re about to seek their own ‘recovery action’ for a potential
$100,000,000,000. Yes, that’s one hundred billion in US dollars he could be
found liable for.
And Craig’s opinion of this? Oh, he and Calvin Ayre, his gullible billionaire-
backer, have been working hard in the preceding years leading up to this
day of reckoning to apparently spin it, not as a potentially-catastrophic
exposure to financial ruin but, rather, as a means by which they will claim
that, win or lose, the outcome will imply that the court accepts he is Satoshi
Nakamoto and, as a result, this will pave the way for Craig to seek his own
court judgement in laying claim to the famed ‘Satoshi Stash’ and conduct
yet-another fraudulent ‘recovery action’, an erroneous absurdity so devoid
of legal and technical merit it suggests an extreme case of ‘Folie à deux’
runs rife within their toxic partnership, but something they are seemingly
willing to risk untold fortune for in deranged pursuit of the title and the
treasure.
You literally could not make this story up. It would be considered both too
fantastical and farcical to believe!
Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. Full stop.
The real Satoshi Nakamoto remains unknown to this day, and unless and
until otherwise definitely outed, “We are all Satoshi”.
Except Craig Wright, of course.
The end.
