Craig Wright Ordered to Pay $100 Million in Kleiman v Wright Lawsuit
Written by Arthur van Pelt
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material — witness statements, trial exhibits, appeal or settlement information, etc. — related to the Kleiman v Wright trial will become available in the weeks and months after this trial, this article 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.
December 13, 2021: Today, self-custody Bitcoin wallet Hexa awarded me a prize of 2,100,000 satoshis (~$1,000) on Twitter for my contributions to the Bitcoin community. In their Sats Santa campaign they stated:
“Today we celebrate @MyLegacyKit for the detailed work in his relentless pursuit of truth.”
This article was, on their request, mildly refurbished for a larger audience, and republished on the Bitcoin Magazine and on the Nasdaq websites.
Craig Wright has suffered a massive loss in the almost 4 years old legal dispute between US citizen Ira Kleiman and himself. The Australian born Craig Steven Wright, currently living in the UK after fleeing his home country during the heat of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) raids in December 2015 (a hasty run during which he even hid in a toilet from the police) now has to pay 100 million dollar in monetary damages for conversion as ordered by US Federal Judge Bloom, who, at the same time, did not rule who the possible creator of Bitcoin is.
The time has finally come, after almost 4 years of litigation, three weeks of jury trial and a little over a week of jury deliberations, that we have a case closing verdict in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. And it is truly a resounding verdict.
Craig Wright, after having faced intermediate rulings by the Miami Judges Reinhart and Bloom for “willful and bad faith pattern of obstructive behavior, perjured testimony, deceptive pleadings, filing a false declaration, willfully creating fraudulent documents” and the likes, is now ordered to pay no less than $100 million to W&K Info Defense Research LLC (W&K) on the accusation of “Conversion”.
‘Top ten verdict of 2021 in the US’
According to well known American cryptocurrency lawyer Stephen Palley, partner of Anderson Kill, $100 million is one of the largest, “Probably one of the top ten verdicts in the US this year.” civil penalties this year for any person in America.
W&K is only one of two plaintiffs in the lawsuit, of which Ira Kleiman is the sole member after the death of his brother Dave Kleiman in April 2013. The other plaintiff is Ira Kleiman himself, as said the brother and heir of the late Dave Kleiman who was also the sole member of the company that he raised in 2011.
Now let’s make one thing perfectly clear from the get-go; this lawsuit was never about determining if Craig Wright, or anyone else for that matter, is possibly Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, and issuing a ruling about such fact-finding. However, there is a firm case to be made that the Jury, during their deliberations to come to a verdict about seven different accusations, completely rejected this, considered by many as false, claim of Craig Wright. More about that later.
Jury’s Deliberations
The interesting thing is that the Jury’s verdict does not contain an explanation of how this verdict for Conversion was reached. Let’s note first that the dispute between Ira Kleiman and Craig Wright started with as many as seven different accusations:
· Breach of Partnership
· Breach of Fiduciary Duty
· Fraud
· Constructive Fraud
· Civil Theft
· Unjust Enrichment
· Conversion
So why was Conversion the only item from this list to be chosen to award a penalty for?
After having followed the entire lawsuit from almost the beginning, and the trial from day-to-day through local court reporter Carolina Bolado and several other public reporters, it strongly appears to me that the Jury has chosen the following line of thought during their deliberations.
For starters, there were no awards for Breach of Partnership and Breach of Fiduciary Duty, as the Jury did not believe the false stories in which Craig Wright presented himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto and as having partnered with Dave in creating and launching Bitcoin. This is crucial to understand from the start.
Because, let’s have a look at the facts of this matter. Only a few pieces of presumed evidence of Craig’s Satoshi-ness were provided during trial to support this (mis)representation, and they were nowhere near convincing. For example, the Jury was treated with a (highly anticipated and broadly discussed outside court) handwritten meeting note with a BDO logo from 2007, the era when Craig was still working at that accountancy firm. In this handwritten note, the future roll-out of Bitcoin for the years 2007 and 2008 was supposedly planned and worked out in different items like coding, testing and launching.
However, such a handwritten note could have been written at any time in the years well after 2007. And in the case of Craig Wright this is a certainty, knowing his history in creating truckloads of Satoshi Nakamoto related counterfeits, of which many more were presented, and thoroughly debunked, during trial. In fact, since Craig Wright has only been building on his Satoshi Nakamoto fantasies in the years starting from 2014, it can be said with certainty that the meeting note was written sometime in the years 2014–2021. In any case, we can safely assume that this kind of “evidence” has not been very convincing to the jury.
Craig Wright’s Counsel
Craig Wright’s own lawyers have also contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the thorough destruction of Craig Wright’s false representation to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
During their closing arguments, just before the jury deliberations started, they performed a classic “Chewbacca defense” in which they stated several times “stinking pile of lies and forgeries” and “it makes no sense!”. Craig Wright was even compared with a “fantasist” by his own counsel!
Let’s grab some quotes.
“Plaintiffs claims are based on a stinking pile of lies and forgeries! It makes no sense! When it makes no sense, award the defense!”
“So we have this heaping, stinking pile of lies and forgeries, and this is what the plaintiffs are basing their case on? Their case is that CSW is a liar and a forger, but I’m going to use another word — “Fantasist”.”.
“Their ENTIRE case is cherry picked from what they are calling a stinking pile of lies and forgeries. How can you make a case like that? THAT’S how they baked the cherry pie. Using cherries picked from a stinking pile of lies. You can’t call a person a liar and then just go to what the liar and forger says! THAT MAKES NO SENSE!”
Then, Craig’s counsel concluded their closing arguments with:
“So in summary, the plaintiffs, where do they go, other than CSW’s statements, and his alleged forgeries? Can you rely on statements by someone you’re being told is a pile of stinking lies and forgeries?”.
Chewbacca defense quotes pulled from courtroom notes and reporting by Twitter user FractalEncrypt.
Now let’s bring back to memory that Craig Wright’s statement as recent as August 30, 2018 — which is six months AFTER the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit started — was this:
Now imagine that Ira’s counsel relentlessly defended their position with handfuls of these examples where Craig Wright, and only Craig Wright or sources quoting Craig Wright, declared on numerous occasions that he had worked together and partnered with Dave Kleiman to create and launch Bitcoin.
And now imagine the effect of Craig’s counsel Chewbacca defense.
The Chewbacca defense once again drew Jury’s attention to the undeniable fact that, indeed, Ira Kleiman’s apparent support to Craig Wright’s false Satoshi Nakamoto narrative and Craig’s made up Dave-Craig Bitcoin partnership, are BOTH based on a stinking pile of lies and forgeries, to which the Jury had full access during deliberations: digital documents with adjusted metadata, backdated email forgeries (in fact, ALL Craig-Dave-Bitcoin emails were destroyed as forgeries during discovery), false PGP key use cases, altered blog posts, fake contracts, made up chatroom conversations, forged screenshots, several Dr Edman forensic reports describing numerous digital forgeries in full glory, the damning ATO reports where Craig Wright’s ‘Faketoshi’ empire was thoroughly taken down as a ‘nullity based on sham’ (including the Prof David Rees cooperation in Craig’s Satoshi team!), many unreliable and conflicting witness statements that made no sense…
So no doubt the hilarious Chewbacca defense from Craig’s attorney had the Jury thinking, and thinking again after an Allen charge(*) issued by Judge Bloom when they were completely stuck deciding on the accusations halfway the deliberations.
(*) When jurors cannot agree on a verdict and report this to a judge, the judge may issue further instruction to them to encourage those in the minority to reconsider their position. These instructions are known as an Allen charge or, more casually, as a dynamite charge.
In this context, it is also curious to note that court reporter Carolina Bolado, who reported, unbiased, during trial on the facts alone, is known to have stated in a podcast on December 13, 2021:
“[Craig Wright] just does not come across as credible or trustworthy on the stand. [He is] the most unlikable, awful person I’ve ever seen on the stand.”
In this scenario, where Craig Wright’s overall credibility is seriously questioned or otherwise highlighted by two Judges, by Plaintiffs’ counsel, even by his own counsel in a Chewbacca defense AND by an independent professional reporter, it is virtually impossible to imagine that a Jury with ten members will not see the same. This Jury will no doubt start questioning each and every one of Craig’s claims, and they will certainly not see Craig Wright’s false Satoshi claim separate from the, just as false, Dave-and-Craig-working-together-on-the-launch-of-Bitcoin-in-a-partnership claim.
And as a result, the Defense counsel got exactly what it asked for: an invalidation of both “Breach” charges, as in the rejection of the Satoshi claim, automatically the partnership claim is invalidated too.
One of many examples of Craig Wright’s forgeries, popping up in the Kleiman v Wright case. Craig Wright himself bought these two empty shelf companies in January 2014 from CFS, but in front of the ATO he falsely represented as if Dave Kleiman bought these companies in 2012.
Fraud, or no fraud?
But then, why no Jury reward for “Fraud” and/or “Constructive Fraud”? In my opinion, and please allow discussion to begin about this stance, when Jury deliberated about these two accusations, they likely determined that the actual fraud — of the CRIMINAL kind — was largely aimed at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) in the years 2013–2015, and as such there was not so much — CIVIL — fraud against Ira Kleiman and/or Dave Kleiman’s company W&K to determine. And again, Kleiman v Wright is a civil lawsuit. Therefore, it will be left to the ATO, who has been conducting a criminal investigation into Craig Wright since at least 2018 (we know this from another filing in Kleiman v Wright), to tackle the criminal fraud that Craig Wright allegedly performed. At the moment, it appears that in the USA this case is closed. And unless Judge Bloom will decide in the coming weeks that an additional criminal prosecution should be filed against Craig Wright, where we could possibly determine if my analysis about Fraud makes any sense, we might not easily find out what the deliberations were about the Fraud accusations. On the other hand, I do not consider the chance of further action from Judge Bloom that substantial, to be honest. But, who knows.
Fact is, the Jury did not find Craig Wright liable for penalties for Fraud and/or Constructive Fraud.
Conversion
That leaves the last three accusations on the list: “Civil Theft”, “Unjust Enrichment” and “Conversion”. Of those three theft-related allegations, Conversion was chosen because it comes closest to what was really going on in the case. To understand this properly, we have to take a deep dive in to the lawsuit. Buckle up, and follow me for a little rollercoaster ride through the 2011–2013 era.
Early 2011, Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman had tried, under the company W&K label, to land four IT/cybersecurity related projects from the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS). However, their four proposals were kindly but firmly rejected by DHS. After that, the two men didn’t perform any more business activities under the W&K label, and as a result W&K was struck from the local registry in 2012 when Dave Kleiman — the sole member of W&K — didn’t pay for the renewal of the registration.
Then, in the second half of 2013, Craig started to completely rewrite the history of W&K; with backdated documents, supported by a completely different story than what actually had happened in 2011, the four rejected DHS project numbers were used in a completely made up mix of Bitcoin related business elements (and some gold was also thrown in, funnily enough), and now W&K 2011 had suddenly turned from an IT/cybersecurity company without having done any business into a company holding Bitcoin IP in 2013! This starts to smell like, as Jury very likely concluded, illegal “Conversion”.
Incidentally, in 2013 and early 2014 during and after Craig’s illegal conversion, W&K was still registered in the US as a dissolved company, which led to an extremely embarrassing moment for Craig Wright with the ATO later in 2014, when the latter told him that W&K was not really an active company at all. Craig then immediately felt compelled to urgently deploy a certain individual called Uyen Nguyen to reactivate W&K on his behalf. This course of events did, of course, not go unnoticed by the ATO, and it ended up on the long, long list of questionable and fraudulent cases described in the plethora of ATO reports.
More about these ATO reports in my article series “Faketoshi, The Early Years” written together with the well-known scam researcher “CryptoDevil”.
This fraudulent overhaul of a 2011 IT/cybersecurity related company into a Bitcoin related company in 2013 allowed Craig Wright to start reclaiming the Bitcoin intellectual property — again, IP which didn’t exist at all in 2011 — in a fraudulent double claim lawsuit against W&K towards the end of 2013. And this trick worked, because W&K, dissolved and only member Dave Kleiman being dead since April 2013, was not able to be represented during the claims lawsuit. Instead, it was Craig Wright himself who sat down at the defense site, roleplayed on paper by his ex-employee and CFO Jamie Wilson. To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, Jamie Wilson had no idea that this had happened after he suddenly left Craig’s startup Hotwire the month before. Reason for his sudden leave: serious suspicions of fraud that Craig was setting up and committing. How right he was!
Nevertheless, this bag of tricks worked out well for Craig Wright initially, and he fraudulently obtained an Australian Supreme Court’s stamp of approval on the two claims, and the basically worthless joint, shared IT/cybersecurity IP of Dave Kleiman and Craig Wright from 2011 was now illegally converted into Bitcoin related IP valued — from thin air — $57 million that only Craig Wright held in 2013. And Craig Wright benefited financially, or tried to at least, from this illegal conversion, as he used the falsely obtained, but paper-only, $57 million in Bitcoin IP to advance his Australian tax fraud further in late 2013, 2014 and 2015.
To conclude, this is the illegal “Conversion” that is now ultimately penalized by the Jury in Miami with a whopping $100 million. And since the true financial harm of this illegal act of conversion was done to the ATO (as Craig Wright advanced his 2013–2015 tax fraud with the illegal conversion), there were no punitive damages awarded to W&K.
The whole conversion scheme described above was ultimately not accepted by the ATO. Together with many other Potemkin Villages that Craig Wright had created in these years (for example the MJF Mining scheme, an identical fraudulent set up as the W&K conversion, which was called out as “nullity based on sham”, see image) it was nullified as a whole in Craig’s bookkeeping and as a consequence corrected in his tax refund claims.
“Moreover, we do not accept that the NSWSC [New South Wales Supreme Court] court proceedings resulted in any acquisition by you of software and or IP from W&K, or any acquisition by you of software and or IP from W&K for the value asserted. The NSWSC did not consider any evidence or make any findings of fact as to the existence or value of the software you purportedly acquired from W&K as a result of the proceedings.”
Above is another example of a Craig Wright forgery, a forgery that he apparently used to defraud Calvin Ayre in June 2015 during negotiations around his bailout. It’s a paper wallet, unraveled in detail by WizSec Bitcoin Research, for the infamous 1Feex address that, according to the same WizSec, contains 80,000 BTC stolen from Mt Gox on March 1, 2011.
Meanwhile Craig is claiming he bought these 80,000 coins in February 2011 from a Russian exchange called WMIRK; however this exchange didn’t offer Bitcoin services before September 25, 2013:
This paper wallet forgery, trying to represent a value of almost $4,000,000,000 at today’s Bitcoin price, shows the great lengths that Craig Wright is going to keep his Bitcoin scam alive.
What is Conversion anyway?
After the verdict became known, in which it was ordered that Craig Wright has to pay $100,000,000 for Conversion, which basically labels him a court approved ‘thief’, a lot of discussion ignited online. What is conversion anyway? The best explanation I could find is from Reddit user “Annuit-bitscoin”, who explained on December 13, 2021:
“Conversion is a legal concept, and like all legal concepts, it’s not some universal and immutable rule. It is embodied in that name in statutes in common law jurisdictions all around the world, but since it commonly exists on both criminal and civil sides, it has to be particularized right off the bat.
As a civil law concept, it’s simple: If you misappropriate something that doesn’t belong to you, you are liable to the actual owners. There is a harm amenable to remedy if I take your bike, use it, and then return it without permission. What if you wanted to use the bike in that interim? You couldn’t. What if you had to cancel a trip because your bike was missing?
What if, for instance, I started charging other people to borrow your bike while I had it? That money doesn’t rightfully belong to me, does it? No, it belongs to you.
This can even be inverted: what if I actually kept the bicycle, but originally was mistaken and thought the bicycle was mine? When did I “steal” it?
Thus it isn’t necessary to establish that I unequivocally stole the bike with explicit intent — maybe I had borrowed it in the past but this time I didn’t have permission because I knew you were taking a trip. “Theft” has the connotation (and generally, the legal implication) that the deprivation was intended as permanent AND that I knew I had no entitlement. But that’s just a generality, and we lack individual words for every possible nuance (e.g. larceny, robbery, burglary, thievery, heist, holdup, mugging, shoplifting etc…) and if we do, they often don’t map to the same categories in every jurisdiction if they map at all, and regular people have to think to even start to differentiate.
It’s important to remember, in this case, an important bone of contention in the common consensus here: Neither Dave Kleiman nor Craig Wright, joint or severally, invented bitcoin; mined bitcoin; ever created any bitcoin-related IP. W&K had nothing of value in it.
What Craig did, was steal the company, as a company, as a prop in his various schemes. This theft allowed him, eventually, to sell a false narrative to Calvin Ayre that netted Craig millions.
Conversion fits this perfectly. Craig didn’t steal something of value, he stole something valueless and then used it to create value.
It’s easy to see that the Jury didn’t want to create any implication whatsoever that any of Craig’s stories were real. He didn’t mine bitcoin or invent any bitcoin IP, so he couldn’t have stolen any of that. But, at the same time, since it’s simply a fact that Craig stole (the otherwise worthless) W&K and used it to make millions, yeah, that money isn’t his.
That’s why the consensus of this community is that we are perfectly happy with this verdict. For me personally, it unwound precisely the way I wished it would, months and months before the trial even started.
It’s also why Craig and Cronies are spinning, spinning, spinning, because it completely defeats the narrative that this trial would implicitly recognize that Craig did x,y,z with Dave Kleiman by finding him liable over it. This was a crazy misrepresentation anyway, but the jury left no vestige of Craig’s claims whatsoever. Anything that smacked of Craig’s representations was rejected.
And so we have a very precise, very accurate verdict: Craig is liable for misappropriating W&K. Yes, in common language, “stealing” it, the jury just wasn’t going to give any possible vindication to the notion that there was actually anything in it.
Because if Craig is going to bet the farm on conversion as the appropriate term in everyday language, he can’t simultaneously claim (completely wrongly) that “conversion” is when you store something in a storage facility that then burns down.
No, the owner of the storage didn’t “convert” anything unless they refused to allow you to remove it. It’s just bailment with a duty of care under the standard of strict liability (which, I imagine, every storage center in existence has a waiver for).”
The One Trillion Claim
But still, a reward of $100 million sounds like a massive drain for Ira Kleiman, knowing that nearly $1 trillion was demanded during the trial that lasted more than 4 weeks, if we may believe court reporter Carolina Bolado. On November 23, 2021 she reported on Twitter:
This is very well explainable, though.
The strategy in such a civil lawsuit will, of course, be to collect as many accusations and charges as possible, in addition to coming up with every reason to demand the highest possible financial satisfaction — and with an individual on the defense side impersonating Satoshi Nakamoto, who is estimated to have mined around 1 million Bitcoin (with a current market value of around $50 billion) in Bitcoin’s early days, as well as representing to own billions in intellectual property, this pumping-to-the- sky of a claim reward is not very difficult anymore.
For example, there is the anecdote that Craig Wright just before the start of the jury trial in his Slack chat room claimed that the IP amount at stake in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit would be a stunning $252 billion, and evidence of this statement was, of course, immediately brought into trial by Ira Kleiman’s lawyers.
Now all that is left is to defend each and every accusation as best as you can to figure out what sticks with the Judges and Jury.
But…
Because the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit is, as said before, built on the quicksand of Craig Wright falsely claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, with a nonsense story of a collaboration with Dave Kleiman to develop Bitcoin, there was not much left in the end as this house of cards collapsed in front of the eyes of the Miami Jury during their truth-finding process of deliberations.
”The Claimant has taken out a Bitcoin SV denominated commercial loan against the Claimant’s and the Tulip Trust’s Bitcoin and Bitcoin SV holdings, that will be paid back to Mr Ayre.” — found in one of Craig Wright’s other lawsuits, where he is the Claimant
Let’s not forget though, $100 million is a debt that Craig Wright is not able to pay. After being completely financially ruined in 2015 with millions in ATO claims and fines to pay, then being bailed out by Robert McGregor and Stefan Matthews (with Calvin Ayre in the background), Craig has not been able to financially recover in the years since. In particular, Calvin Ayre has funded all of his in- and out-of-court rampages, with Craig Wright’s non-existent Tulip Trust as a backup in some cases. Non-existent? Yes, non-existent, more on that in a bit. And yes, we do call that a “Nigerian prince advance fee scam”.
Long story short, Craig Wright probably has little to no money of his own, and apparently a lot of debt. And now $100 million has been added to his debt.
Misleading Press Coverage
Because not everyone understands the background and the finesses of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, a lawsuit surrounding a fantasist who is impersonating Satoshi Nakamoto and who, by his own account, falsely claimed for many years that he had partnered with Dave Kleiman in creating Bitcoin, there are currently hilarious headlines to be found online.
Headlines like the ones found at Fox Business: “Man who claims he invented Bitcoin wins trial, keeps Bitcoins worth $50B” or as found at the website of The Australian: “Court decides Australian is bitcoin creator”.
It is clear that one media didn’t understand the Plaintiff’s accusations that were ruled upon, and the explicit exclusion of a Satoshi determination from the rulings by the Judges, and what to say about the $50 billion in Bitcoin that Craig Wright can “keep”? What you don’t have in the first place, you can’t keep in the second place, right?
Hilarious.
A special mention in this section is for Calvin Ayre’s media outlet CoinGeek, an outlet that is fully dedicated to spreading the false message that Craig Wright is someone who he isn’t: the sole inventor of Bitcoin. During these efforts, they do not fail to regularly misrepresent what has happened during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit and trial.
One such examples is where they, by mouth of writer Jordan Atkins, during the course of the trial, tried to suggest that either plaintiff Ira Kleiman, or case witness Jamie Wilson (former CFO of Craig’s company Hotwire in 2013) is the serial forger in the case, and certainly not Craig Wright.
Or, why didn’t Ira and Jamie team up and create forgeries together, the Craig Wright fans suggested after this article was published?
Of course, it was since long found by the Judges Reinhart and Bloom that Craig Wright is the person guilty of “willfully creating the fraudulent documents”, as he is the only person who has the means, the motives, the incentives, and of course the opportunity to create the mindboggling stash of forgeries evidenced in the lawsuit. And he is the only person who structurally holds these means, motives, incentives and opportunities since 2013 when Craig’s tax fraud (in which he initially start using Bitcoin rich list addresses as a scam tool) and — a little later in 2014 — his Satoshi cosplay started.
Telling is also the fact that Craig Wright never seriously inquired the hacks, he never filed a police report in support of his numerous complaints in public or in court, let alone that he ever sued someone for this relentless hacking and altering of his material — material that initially tries to add credibility to his Satoshi-ness when it is revealed by Craig Wright, but when it sooner or later fails to deliver on authenticity, is always hacked and altered: by someone else.
Here is where the narrator would interrupt the scene with a wry-and-dry voice-over.
“The dog ate my homework, Judge.”
But hearing these “hack” excuses from Craig Wright numerous times over the course of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, with ever-changing names who might have performed these “hacks”, these excuses start to lose credibility fast, if they had any at all, the Judges in Kleiman v Wright must have thought.
Judge Reinhart expressed it well in one of his orders, dated August 27, 2019.
“When it was favorable to him, Dr. Wright appeared to have an excellent memory and a scrupulous attention to detail. Otherwise, Dr. Wright was belligerent and evasive. He did not directly and clearly respond to questions. He quibbled about irrelevant technicalities. When confronted with evidence indicating that certain documents had been fabricated or altered, he became extremely defensive, tried to sidestep questioning, and ultimately made vague comments about his systems being hacked and others having access to his computers. None of these excuses were corroborated by other evidence.”
Anyway. Jordan Atkin’s article is based around an March 2008 email from Craig Wright to Dave Kleiman with subject “Defamation and the difficulties of law on the Internet”. As it was supposedly coming from the crjbr.org domain that Craig Wright didn’t obtain before 2011, it is of course impossible to send emails from that domain in 2008. So it is indeed a clear forgery.
During trial, Craig’s counsel came up with an IP address (located in Wooloowin, Brisbane) found in relationship to the email forgery, and implied that because Jamie Wilson was living and working in that neighborhood, it was very likely a forgery created by him.
What Jordan Atkins forgets to mention though, is that after Craig’s counsel’s suggestion, Ira’s counsel came up with over 75 emails — genuine, authenticated Craig Wright emails — with the EXACT same IP address. Oopsie one.
Jordan Atkins also suggests that it was Ira Kleiman who brought in the email as exhibit, adding to the suspicion that it was probably him who created the forged email. What Jordan Atkins forgets to mention though, is that the email is labeled in the court docket, on the exhibits list, with a so-called DEFAUS code to indicate the origins of the exhibit. DEF stands for DEFENSE, which is Craig Wright. Oopsie two.
Above is an example of the same March 2008 email forgery, but this time from the information-defense domain that Craig Wright obtained in January 2009. So it is, again, a clear forgery. And this forged email was also used as exhibit in the lawsuit. So what we learned, Craig Wright created not one but two forged versions of that same email, and while Ira Kleiman ended up with the other version, this version was added in the late 2015 Wired/Gizmodo dox package.
Jordan Atkins of CoinGeek will, of course, not tell you all these things.
Miami Fun Facts
To conclude this article, let’s go through a few fun facts from this now, assuming no party in the case is going to appeal, closed lawsuit.
Firstly, the $100 million penalty isn’t the only monetary penalty that Craig Wright has gotten himself into. At the beginning of 2020, he also had to pay a penalty for obstruction of the judicial procedure of $165,800.09.
Secondly, if Craig Wright doesn’t pay the $100,000,000 now ordered from him, there’s an interest rate ticker that is increasing his debt with nearly $800 every day. The “Debt Clock” can be followed on this page, part of a website that contains comprehensive information about Craig’s lawsuits, Bitcoin and other industry hot shots’ views on Craig Wright’s claims, and more.
Thirdly, we will continue to enjoy, in current and future lawsuits where Craig Wright is a party on either side, the many interim rulings of Judge Reinhart and Judge Bloom. And I expect some embarrassing moments for Craig Wright from especially this damning ruling:
“The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists.”
How did this ruling come about? During discovery, it had been found by Judge Reinhart that Craig Wright had continuously perjured himself about the Tulip Trust, and had only provided fraudulent documents and other falsified material about this same trust where Craig claimed his Bitcoin and other Bitcoin related assets were “locked”.
Reinhart showed no mercy after these findings: there is no trust, there are no encrypted files, and there are no mined or bought Bitcoin in the trust. No trust, no trust assets. Another Potemkin Village.
Can we add some insult to this injury? Yes, we can.
Craig Wright desperately tried to save himself from this ruling, and pretended a “bonded courier” had arrived in January 2020 who delivered a Tulip Trust list of assets —among them the Bitcoin public addresses Craig claims he mined in 2009 and 2010 — to his wife Ramona. It turned out the fabled bonded courier was a Kenyan lawyer named Denis Mayaka, the same individual who helped him obtain the Seychelles based empty shelf company Tulip Trading Ltd in October 2014, the month when the fake Tulip Trust saga started!
After this news broke out, the price of Craig’s altcoin project BSV literally exploded: Craig’s Satoshi-ness was finally conclusively proven, his fans must have thought?
The list of Bitcoin public addresses was immediately handed over to Ira Kleiman’s counsel in January 2020, who filed this list in May 2020 as an exhibit. The Tulip Trust list was supported by Craig’s statement “The receipt of these documents and my inspection of them allowed me to recognize the authenticity of the other documents, including the list of public addresses.”.
So far so good, one must think. But no.
Within a few days after filing of the Tulip Trust list, and accidentally becoming publicly available on the CourtListener website in the Kleiman v Wright court docket (as it was supposed to be a sealed exhibit, but something went wrong in the filing process), this list — containing 16,404 Bitcoin addresses with 50 BTC each — was signed 145 times “Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud” by the true owner(s) of these 145 Bitcoin addresses on Craig’s list.
Oops. That hurts. They were supposed to be Craig Wright’s addresses that he had mined in 2009–2010 as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ and that went straight into an encrypted file, were locked behind Secret Shamir Schemes, and hidden in the Seychelles-based Tulip Trust, remember? How is it even technically possible that the list got mixed with other early Bitcoin miners’ addresses? It isn’t, of course.
Then, over time, on some 10 to 15 of the public addresses on this list, coins started to move unexpectedly. On top, the infamous “Shadders Bug” and other anomalies were found in the list of Bitcoin addresses. In short, utter destruction again of everything Tulip Trust. Please go read the full story here, where Twitter member @Tak_Horigoshi breaks down the whole Tulip Trust list debacle in detail.
Let’s not forget to note that this is a mindboggling $40 billion fraud being performed here by Craig Wright, who represented, and still represents till today, to have a trust that doesn’t legally exist, that has no real life assets, and that is supported by a thoroughly fraudulent Tulip Trust list.
And the BSV altcoins' price? Since it topped in January 2020 around 0.052 BTC, it has only been going downhill until BSV made a recent low of 0.0018 BTC. That’s a drop of a whopping 96.5% within two years.
So make no mistake here, this all adds to the rightful conclusion that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, but instead simply a relentless and shameless con man who, despite his desperate antics, gets called out like clockwork in- and outside courts all over the world for his “perjury” and “willfully creating fraudulent documents”.
What follows is a little compilation of seven judges on three continents on the credibility of Craig Wright, from Kleiman v Wright and other court cases.
Fourth, Craig Wright has built quite the track record during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. We can now safely say, based on all the rulings by both Judges and Jury, that he is a Florida court approved:
- Fraud
- Perjurer
- Serial forger
- Thief
Lastly, during the Miami trial, the undersigned @MyLegacyKit received a humbling ’thank you’ on Twitter from Vel Freedman, the head of Ira Kleiman’s legal team.
The end. Thanks for reading.
