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.