Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1
Written by Arthur van Pelt, with assistance from CryptoDevil
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material might become available after publication of this article, it will have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, to become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
How did Craig Wright (full name Craig Steven Wright) become one of a plethora of modern day Satoshi Nakamoto pretenders — of whom Jorg Molt, accused of defrauding $214 million from 50 investors, was finally arrested a few weeks ago?
Let’s try to find an answer to this question, and map out what we know about the years 2003–2013 (Ryan v Wright lawsuit, and aftermath) and 2011, when Craig apparently first learned about Bitcoin, up till the very end of 2015 when Wired and Gizmodo magazines published their now infamous articles about Craig Wright possibly being Satoshi Nakamoto. And let’s not forget about the ATO raids that quickly followed the next day! Are these events related after all, or not?
In this series of three articles, we will learn everything about the Ryan v Wright lawsuit that ran from 2003 to 2006, including all appeals, but had an aftermath till 2013 which almost caused Craig to go bankrupt. Then there’s the fraudulent 2013 New South Wales Supreme Court claims, the extremely thorough ATO inquiry in 2013 — 2015, and we will of course show the reader a fair number of the numerous forgeries that Craig Wright created in 2013, 2014 and 2015 to support his Bitcoin fraud and false Satoshi claims.
Part 1 will cover Craig being a teenager up till February 2014.
Part 2 will cover February 2014 — December 2014.
Part 3 will cover January 2015 — December 2015.
Disclaimer: You will see many times the $ symbol being used. Since Craig Wright lived in Australia in the period of these articles, the $ symbol used in numbers related to Craig will always refer to the Australian dollar (AUD), except where indicated otherwise.
The Run Up
We kick off with an anecdote about Craig’s teenager years around 1985. Twitter user Frank Rundatz went after this anecdote that Craig Wright told his audience in 2021.
“Did Craig Wright participate in the programming of the video game Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension? Craig was born in October of 1970 and was living in Australia at the time that the classic game was released in 1985. Today I saw on Twitter a reference to Craig Wright having been a programmer or possibly a tester on this game. In addition to the attached thread, here is a YouTube video at the 9 hour and 22 minute mark where he mentions his involvement in the game:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wGw6rBv7nlc?09h22m00s
It was created by a company named Adventure International in the state of Florida in the United States. It didn’t seem plausible that a 14 year old Craig Wright was hired by a company on the other side of the world to contribute his programming talent. The founder of Adventure International is Scott Adams who is still very engaged in the retro computing scene. I don’t know Scott directly but we have friends in common. So today I reached out to Scott and asked him about Craig Wright. Here was his response: Thanks for connecting with me. The YouTube is 9 and half hours long so I don’t think I will be watching it. The name Craig Wright is not familiar to me. The Buckaroo Adventure game was done in house by a number of my employees and I over saw the effort at the time. I think I was busy working on Marvel Games and that is why they were designated to do it. He might have been a tester, and again I just don’t remember the name atm. I blurred out the rest of the email — it wasn’t about Craig Wright. From Scott’s response, it doesn’t sound like Craig Wright was a programmer on this game. Was he a tester?”
“The original claim is that a 13–15 year old Australian was involved in programming and/or testing a game developed by a production company in Florida in 1984–1985. I got my first modem in 1985. It cost about a dollar a minute for me to connect to a computer 8 miles away due to long distance charges. Did Craig have a modem in 1984–1985? How did he collaborate with other programmers? How did he report bugs? How much did a long distance call cost from Australia to Florida per minute? How did he receive/send source code? How long did a package take to travel? How much did it cost to send it? The claim that a Florida company chose to hire an Australian teenager to work on their game in 1984–1985 is simply not plausible. It’s a logistical nightmare. So I asked the creator of the game and he said in a polite way he hasn’t heard of him. Is that 100%? Nothing is 100%.”
Quote from the What the Finance article.
“Born in October 1970, Craig Wright would have been around 14 or 15 years old when “Buckaroo Bonzai” hit the gaming scene. Developed by Adventure International in Florida, the game is a hallmark of 1980s entertainment. Now, given the timing and the geographical distance, some raised eyebrows are justified. How would a teenager living in Australia be involved in a game created in the United States? Was it even possible given the technological constraints of the time?
<<snip>>
Here’s where things get interesting: the internet, as we know it, was pretty much non-existent in the mid-’80s. The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which underpins the web, was only introduced in 1989. Before that, most corporate networks didn’t use Internet Protocol (IP). In fact, internet access in the ’80s was so rare that Rundatz highlights how, even by 1996 when he started an Internet Service Provider (ISP), internet access was not a given.
So, let’s get back to young Craig Wright. How could a 14-year-old, living in Australia, with no access to the modern internet, collaborate with a gaming company based in Florida? Rundatz himself got his first modem in 1985, and it cost him about a dollar a minute to connect to a computer just 8 miles away, thanks to long-distance call charges. The logistics alone make it highly unlikely. How would Wright have communicated with the developers? How would he have reported bugs? How would he have accessed or shared source code? Sending a physical package across continents wasn’t exactly quick or cheap either.
All of these questions point to a glaring issue. The claim just doesn’t add up. Even if Wright did have a modem, the constraints of the time, the cost, and the geographical distance make the whole notion of his involvement more of a head-scratcher than a plausible fact. Adams’ own lack of recollection about Wright in his response only adds more weight to the skepticism.”
We jump over a decade into the future now. In 1999, Craig incorporated one Australian company:
- Vin De La Terre Pty Ltd (June 9, 1999)
- which morphed into DeMorgan Information Security Systems Pty Ltd (December 17, 2001)
In 2001, Craig incorporated another Australian company:
- Ridges Estate Pty Ltd (December 17, 2001)
Let us begin, at the outset, by framing both the character and the historical behaviour of Craig Wright, in providing you a summary of his legal 'difficulties' arising from a breach of contract and subsequent contempt of court in 2003.
Original hearing October 30, 2003 and resulting Judgement November 6, 2003
Craig and Lynn Wright were, in a personal capacity and through ownership of a corporate entity shareholder, the majority owners of the Australian company DeMorgan Information Security Systems Pty Limited.
"The company’s business includes the provision of information technology consulting services in general, and specifically the monitoring of computer systems to guard against “hackers” or other unauthorised intruders."
Its main customers were the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), Craig's former employer, along with the Rail Infrastructure Corporation (RIC) and a number of other businesses. At the end of June 2003, the shareholders of DeMorgan entered into an agreement with Michael Ryan, to sell 5% of the company shares to him for $50,000. Part of the agreement included a non-compete clause which, it doesn't take a law degree to understand, precludes those involved from attempting to poach the company's clients should they subsequently leave its employ.
One month later, following their new investor’s all-too-late discovery of questionable spending within the company, Craig and Lynn Wright resigned as directors and, you guessed it, Craig set about approaching DeMorgan's clients for business, including his former employer the ASX, where he still maintained a good relationship with its employees, with him being cited as claiming he would “spend over a million dollars to see DeMorgan go under”.
Ironically, it would turn out that Craig would, indeed, be found liable for a little under half that amount following the resulting liquidation of DeMorgan arising from his damaging behaviour. A $425,000 bankruptcy notice being charged against Craig Wright in recovery actions sees him eventually settle to avoid the inevitable in 2013.
DeMorgan's new shareholder, clearly smarting from having invested in a business he’d not been given the full truthful picture of, only to see its board members abandon ship one month later and set about damaging the value of his investment further, took them to court, where they were found guilty of a breach of contract and instructed to cease and desist from further contact with the company's clients.
This is the part in the movie where a narrator would cut in with a wry, "Craig Wright did not cease and desist from further contact with the company's clients".
Fast forward to 2004 and Mr Ryan has now had Mr and Mrs Wright dragged back into court for their nefarious activities in contravention of the original court's judgement.
HEARING DATE(S): July 26, 2004, July 27, 2004, August 28, 2004
JUDGMENT DATE: August 31, 2004
The long and the short of this contempt of court case is that email records from Craig's accounts, telephone logs from his mobile number, visitor sign-in logs at DeMorgan client, ASX offices, as well as actual invoices he issued, served to chart a damning record of numerous and persistent efforts by him to secure business after he had left DeMorgan and after he had been told by a court judgement to stop contacting its clients.
Craig’s attempted defence, a low-tech version of his oft-repeated mantra he would come to rely on in the coming years, "It wasn’t me, I was hacked".
But the judge, like those who would follow in later years, saw through his absurd excuses:
Subsequent sentencing demonstrated that judges do not take kindly to defendants who brazenly lie to them and ignore their rulings, "In my view Mr Wright’s deliberate flouting of his undertaking makes this a serious offence. His lack of contrition exacerbates its seriousness. There is a need to bring home to a contemnor the seriousness of his contempt. For the purposes of the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999, s 5(2) these are my reasons for my determining that a sentence of imprisonment is required in this case. I propose to sentence Craig Wright to a term of imprisonment of 28 days.”
This sentence of 28 days imprisonment was suspended on condition that Craig would perform 250 hours of community service, and he was ordered to pay the costs of the proceedings.
In a subsequent 2005 appeal against this judgement, Craig did, in fact, attempt to challenge one particular email amongst the overwhelming evidence against him, citing a slew of claimed IP address differences and disputed access to proxy servers as ‘proof’ it was not he who had sent it, in desperate hope it would magically exonerate him in the face of all other evidence and reason.
It did not.
So, it is this record of dishonesty and desperate reliance on refusing to recognise the validity of evidence which serves to expose his lies and fraud, through his attempts to claim that 'it cannot be proven that somebody else was not responsible for them’, namely, his "I was hacked" go-to, we will see repeated again and again throughout his subsequent entanglement in the following years with the ATO, the Kleiman case, the media and the wider Bitcoin community as a whole.
September 1, 2008: bitcoin.org is registered by the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
In April 2019, Craig Wright claimed on his blog:
“It is incredibly ironic that people think Bitcoin is in any way about anonymity. I wouldn’t stop people trying to hide behind TOR, but such is not the purpose of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was birthed using a credit card payment. The records of the same payment are required to be kept by the banking system for 25 years. It hasn’t been that long. More importantly, I claimed the expenses on my tax in the 2008/2009 tax year. You see, a domain purchase in August 2008 is within the Australian tax year, but I was audited, which ended up going to court.”
“I used AnonymousSpeech.com for many years, and held copies of the SecureAnonymousSurfing software. I started using it when I was investigating malware breaches and peer-to-peer copyright violations. It enabled me to track and analyse people breaching software licenses and media licenses and such people who were attacking my clients, that is, cyber criminals. I used the service as it stopped the cyber criminals from being able to find out who I really was.
This is the source of Vistomail and the registration of the domain bitcoin.org.”
“What you don’t realise yet is that I used my credit card. Yes, as crazy as it might seem to you, I used my credit card to purchase anonymous services. I even claimed it on my tax. I had an argument with the tax office in Australia about claiming it.
It’s funny, people who discount law understand so little about it and the rules of evidence. Well, with a number of court cases about to start, you are going to find out some of the history of Bitcoin. I had a floating account balance on the AnonymousSpeech.com system. What people don’t realise is that the domain is registered on an anonymous site with links to registration in Switzerland, but when I did so, the domain could only be registered using a bank transfer or Visa card.
The site now takes bitcoin, but it didn’t back then because Bitcoin hadn’t existed yet. Such is the ultimate irony to all of it: Bitcoin was never anonymous. It was paid for using a credit card. The domain used was paid for with an account that had money transferred from the credit card network with full KYC and all the logging requirements of the modern banking system.
Don’t worry, the tax office has audited me so many times that none of it could ever be lost. And this one is mine. Unlike many of the other things that have occurred in the companies that I have created, it is something I did personally.”
So far for Craig’s blog. Looks convincing, doesn’t it? Bitcoin’s flag ship website bought with a credit card… Unsurprisingly, it’s a bogus story, supported by a Craig-made forged screenshot. The almost immediate debunk took place here:
Note how Craig Wright is not showing the ‘Credit Cards’ column in his partial screenshot, and that is for obvious reasons it seems.
December 15, 2008: Craig Wright announces that he is going to India the next day to present his paper “Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy” that he wrote with Dave Kleiman and Shyaam Sundhar.
December 2008/January 2009: Craig Wright leaves BDO
From Craig’s current blog, we learn that he received a “golden handshake”, by the end of 2008 from his employer BDO, which indicates he was not leaving voluntarily.
“When I worked at BDO, I took the idea further, and was involved with the development of computer-aided audit tools (CAATs). I was constantly surprised by the level of fraud and corporate misappropriation within every organisation I ever audited. Most issues were very small and added up to be a material amount.
The launch of Bitcoin occurred when it did not as a response to the global financial crisis but as I was offered a golden handshake and could leave in December 2008 and start working on the project in 2009.”
In 2009, Craig incorporated two Australian companies:
- Information Defense Pty Ltd (January 29, 2009)
- Integyrs Pty Ltd (May 11, 2009)
UPDATE: From one of the damning ATO reports filed January 2022 (after the Kleiman v Wright trial) we learn a few interesting tidbits about three of the companies that Craig incorporated so far, being Ridges Estate, Information Defense and Integyrs.
“many where the ATO has disallowed R&D claims and imposed penalties”
Notably, visible at footnote 6, there’s a gap between 2004 and 2008. This was the period that Craig Wright was employed by BDO and had abandoned his R&D claims scheme, which he would pick up again after he left BDO in December 2008. More about that later.
Now, it should be noted a 2019 article written by Murray Distributed Technologies called “Forensic Report Raises Questions about Australian Tax Office’s Handling of Craig Wright Probe” attempts to claim that 'exclusively obtained' correspondence from the ATO serves to refute those who claim that Craig’s business history is predominantly centred around him seemingly earning more from tax rebates than legitimate business activities(1). Their attempted refutation involves citing correspondence from the ATO to Craig Wright relating to an audit the ATO had conducted into Craig’s tax filings for the 2008/2009 year, which also included two instances of him claiming to have personally sold Intellectual Property to the above two companies for $1,350,000 and $896,000 in September 2009 and December 2009, respectively as capital disposals which, when offset against a number of claimed deductions for that tax year, resulted in a net capital gain of $34,713 for the tax year.
(1) while they cite a hand-wavy ‘many claims’, this charge actually originates from the ATO’s very own findings:
Interestingly, in a blog post Craig made very recently in his usual attempt to ‘set the record straight’ along the lines of his tried-and-trusted “what people fail to understand is…” tangled web of obfuscation he likes to weave, he himself addresses this first conflict with the ATO and claims it relates to the sale of rights to the ‘Bitcoin database’ and related Bitcoin IP to these two Australian companies he owned, through an “overseas company and associated trust” as the seller and Info Defense and Integyrs as the buyers.
Yet the ATO, when referencing the content of the meeting they had with Craig about this matter, state that he is claiming to have sold ‘Intellectual Property’ in a personal capacity to these two business entities, hence the capital disposal appearing on his 2008/2009 personal income tax filing that they had flagged up for investigation. There was no ‘overseas company and associated trust’ mentioned at all in this matter, meaning this is a retrospective ‘amendment’ to the story Craig is now telling and is not reflected in the supposed facts as presented in the ‘exclusively obtained’ documents Murray Distributed Technologies attempted to exonerate him with:
Remember, the issue was about Craig’s personal income tax, not an overseas company and trust transaction, which is fully attested to in Craig’s own response to the ATOs investigation at the time:
These are his words specifically relating to the substantial total value of those claimed personal IP transfer transactions, along with his additional explanations concerning the nearly-as-substantial personal expense deductions where he has claimed such things as a large amount of money loaned from his wife to cover his conference attendances and education expenses etc.
Murray Distributed Technologies describes the resultant personal tax liability arising from that net capital gain, on which he would have had to pay an amount of tax, as serving to prove that Craig was not, in fact, abusing the Australian tax system for fun and profit.
Except, of course, it isn’t that cut-and-dry and, certainly when it comes to Craig Wright, we shall see that nothing ever is. For example, sure, he would have had to pay some income tax on this net gain which, for the 2008/2009 tax year was calculated as per the following rates:
Which, as we can see, isn’t a particularly large amount of Australian dollars, albeit we do concede that, for the tax year in question, Craig does not seem to have warranted a tax rebate... personally. But, even though we can see within the correspondence presented in the Murray Distributed Technologies article that the ATO eventually relented and withdrew their objection decision, they don’t quite tell the whole story clearly shown within these facts, namely, of a very large amount of value assigned to this 'Intellectual Property' derived, according to Craig during his interview with the ATO, from the previous ten years of University studies which, even though it apparently did not seemingly warrant patenting, would have seen these two, newly formed, business entities, reporting high-value costs incurred for said purchases on their Business Activity Statements, the basis by which rebates for GST (Australian Sales/VAT tax equivalent), R&D, et al are calculated.
All Craig would have had to ensure is that there was a sufficient amount of personal expenses he could offset against the apparent income he would have received from these two companies in payment for these transactions, in order to avoid being exposed to an excessively high personal tax liability for that period. Which is exactly what he was able to do.
So now Craig is the proud owner of two Australian business entities which are holders of intellectual property of significant value... as attested by the sale by him to them... for the price he dictated.
All that’s needed is for a business owner to ensure that they make sure to file for any GST and/or R&D rebates these business entities might now be entitled to as a result of their expenditure on this Intellectual Property, right?
Indeed.
Around the year 2010 we find contemporaneous evidence from Twitter user ‘Banjo Fingerblast’, who claims he knew, and witnessed, Craig Wright from close by in Australia. His findings are quite revealing, to say the least.
“Oh we all asked Craig about Craig. Any question that he couldn’t answer he just blocks. Loves his echo chamber. BTW try being around Craig at Sydney pubs in the 2010’s like I was and then see what you think of him.
- Constantly asking people to borrow money or invest in his shit & scammy ideas
- Never pays anyone back unless pressured / harassed / shamed (these are $25-$500 amounts I’m talking here)
- Made frequent, sleazy, EXTREMELY unwanted advances towards other peoples girlfriends and VERY young sisters (16–18 yo’s) and any other female he could find
- Constant foul breath
- Arrogant and obnoxious and overly confident without having any reason to be
- Lied constantly just for the fun of it, thought it was funny, and very proud when he could trick someone
He was never thought to be gay back then & I’ve got no reason to think he is. But I didn’t frequent the Sydney gay pub scene. CSW could have been out scamming & sleazing at The Columbian for all I know. He does have a giant work ethic.”
February 9, 2010: Thor (Hammer of God) about Craig Wright
About 1.5 years before Craig Wright learned about Bitcoin, someone in the cybersecurity industry with the nickname “Thor (Hammer of God)” called him out for his abysmal knowledge of security practices. Watch the choice of words.
I’m sure no one missed the quote:
“Once I was able to get past the overwhelming egoism and self-substantiating claims of your contributions to the industry, I arrived at the conclusion that the only portion of the aforementioned page that is not complete drivel and even laughable to anyone who has actually worked towards ascertaining actual risk in production environments, is where you describe your own words as “ravings.” Ravings, of course, means “delirious, irrational speech.””
But the most interesting quote — with Calvin Ayre, Craig Wright’s largest sponsor at the moment of writing, in mind — is found at the end:
“People like you are dangerous and need to be exposed before someone in a position of power actually believes that you know what you are talking about.”
With that said, Craig incorporated three more companies in 2011:
- Cloudcroft Pty Ltd (March 3, 2011)
- Panopticrypt Pty Ltd (June 20, 2011)
- Strasan Pty Ltd (July 21, 2011)
— renamed to C01n Pty Ltd (February 14, 2014)
Also important to keep in mind is that on February 14, 2011 W&K Info Defense Research LLC is being incorporated by Dave Kleiman in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, USA. Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman tried to land four cybersecurity related projects at Homeland Security in the USA, however, that failed. Homeland Security did not intend to use the services of the two men, and politely but firmly rejected all four of their proposals.
None of these aforementioned companies, nor their activities, were Bitcoin related, initially. But in later years, Craig would make them part of his (as we will learn, empty) Bitcoin fraud empire.
January 1, 2011: Paper “Using Checklists To Make Better Best”.
Dated January 1, 2011, this paper written by Craig Wright and Tanveer A Zia, kicks off Craig’s diary running from 2011 to February 2014. It is relevant in that it frames the primary area of the industry sector Craig focused on for these years: Information Technology and Cybersecurity.
February 4, 2011: Let’s introduce Craig’s blog “Cracked, inSecure and Generally Broken”.
While Satoshi Nakamoto left the epoch-defining, revolutionary, decentralised and trustless Bitcoin project to Gavin Andresen et al in December 2010 and “moved on to other things”, Craig was merely rehashing tired old ideas based on thoroughly non-revolutionary technologies. On Craig’s personal blog we find him proposing an extremely un-Satoshi-like ‘new revolution in payments’ idea.
“I am interested in talking with others who may be interested in starting an online gold trading system alone [sic] the lines of a PayPal.”
On a related sidenote: it is not unlikely that the hearsay nothingburger around Ira Kleiman testifying in Kleiman v Wright that during a Thanksgiving dinner in 2009, Dave Kleiman had purportedly told his brother Ira that he, Dave, was working with a ‘wealthy foreign man to develop digital currency and that it would be bigger than Facebook’ is related to this clunky, everything-but-revolutionary payments idea of Craig.
While Craig is desperate for us all to take his word that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, it is of course utterly, and laughably, inconceivable that the mind which brought us Bitcoin would move on to something as clunky and unimaginative as an online-gold-trading-with-a-PayPal-rip-off a mere one-and-half months after departing.
Craig will use his blog in the years 2014 and 2015 to drop (backdated) hints and clues, some subtle, some quite obvious, about his self-declared Satoshi-ness. A handful of these forgeries will be showcased later.
Talking about Craig Wright being interested in payment systems, there’s also this video. Shot around the same era (in the video, largely shot at Woolworths supermarkets, an promotional stand for the “Woolies Earn & Learn” programme is visible, that started running in 2011), we see Craig wearing a hoodie and using a “NFC payment glove”.
Wait, do we notice Craig Wright wearing a hoodie in this clip? Yes, we notice Craig Wright wearing a hoodie in this clip.
On October 30, 2021, Craig would categorically deny such thing ever happened.
July/August 2011: The Conversation comments
At the moment of writing, it is exactly 10 years ago that Craig Wright apparently first learned about Bitcoin. In late July and early August 2011 Craig initially referenced Bitcoin, for what appears to be the first time in his life, through comments he wrote on ‘The Conversation’ website. Examples of which can still be found online:
And another snippet:
Now let’s have a look at Satoshi Nakamoto’s writings. On no public forum where he was active in the 2008–2010 era (Bitcoin Forum, P2P Foundation forum, other message boards), did Satoshi ever spell:
- BitCoin
- Bit Coin
- (Bit Coin)
- bit coins
And remember, Satoshi wrote Bitcoin (or bitcoin) hundreds and hundreds of times on these public forums!
However, to be fair, there is one known instance where Satoshi Nakamoto wrote ‘BitCoin’. Hidden in the dungeons of early Bitcoin code releases, we can find a readme file on SourceForge where he left this typo untouched for a while in 2009.
Within the red box top left, a few snippets from the January/February 2009 readme files are shown, and the October 29, 2009 readme file when Bitcoin changed from Alpha to Beta. Since this file, and the text within, is copied forward to the next Bitcoin code release (and is mildly edited to reflect the release version it supports), it can be considered a one time typo. On November 4, 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto himself corrected this anomaly on SourceForge.
So basically, not once did Craig Wright spell it in 2011 like Satoshi Nakamoto did in public in 2008–2010. One exception is the hardly used readme files with a ‘BitCoin’ typo. Making this finding even more remarkable is the fact that Satoshi’s last known private correspondence with some of the main Bitcoin developers at the time (Gavin Andresen, Martti Malmi and Mike Hearn) is dated end of April 2011, which is just 3 months before Craig made his public comments on the The Conversation website!
For example, Satoshi wrote on April 23, 2011 to Mike Hearn: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone. I do hope your BitcoinJ continues to be developed into an alternative client.”.
Is this the reason why Craig Wright never mentions these online comments on The Conversation website, as they clearly prove his non-Satoshi-ness? One can make an educated guess.
To recap, Satoshi Nakamoto always, without exception, wrote “Bitcoin” or “bitcoin” on all public forums where he had an account, like the cypherpunk mailing list on Metzdowd, P2P Foundation, SourceForge and the Bitcoin Forum linked to the official Bitcoin website (since late 2009 a Simple Machines Forum template, this whole template was moved to the Bitcointalk domain in June 2011 with a simple DNS change). Also from private emails with developers that have been revealed over the years, and we just showed an example, we know that Satoshi Nakamoto always used the same spelling for Bitcoin. And we only know of a ‘BitCoin’ typo in the 2009 SourceForge readme files accompanying the Bitcoin source code releases.
On a related sidenote, in the December 10, 2010 post of Satoshi Nakamoto shown above, a post that he wrote a few days before he left the public eye forever, Satoshi also made clear that putting large amounts of arbitrary data in the Bitcoin blockchain was not advisable, as that “doesn’t scale". And Satoshi is right, it doesn’t scale, for example when it comes to verification and propagation times.
Craig’s latest brainchild BSV, a remote derivative of the original Bitcoin blockchain, which is by Satoshi Nakamoto’s original design only used as a decentralized ledger for the bitcoin token, only remotely resembles something Bitcoin. For example, BSV, which is factually a highly centralized November 2018 minority fork of Bitcoin Cash (who split from Bitcoin in August 2017), allows every type of data to be pumped into their blockchain, against Satoshi Nakamoto’s explicit “Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn’t scale” advice.
As BSV will likely find out longer term, presuming they will not collapse earlier for other reasons, their blockchain will come to a grinding halt at some point, as they listened to Satoshi Nakamoto pretender Craig Wright, and not to the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
Let’s return to Craig Wright, the wannabe Satoshi Nakamoto.
Email, taken from a much longer thread of emails, from Craig Wright to Ira Kleiman, April 23, 2014. Although the email is loaded with lies, the era that Craig mentions here as being where he started his Bitcoin business journey (without Dave Kleiman, of course) appears truthful, as it will be confirmed by another source: Jamie Wilson, Craig’s CFO in 2013 who was deposed in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit on November 8, 2019.
2012, The silence before the storm
After August 2011, Craig Wright did not mention Bitcoin in public ever again as far as we know now. However, from aforementioned deposition of Jamie Wilson in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, we learned that somewhere late 2012, early 2013 Craig was trying to set up a Bitcoin related business, a Bitcoin Banking System according the 2013 design document.
It can be logically concluded that after casually mentioning Bitcoin a few times on The Conversation website, Craig had started to study the Bitcoin subject, and it is probably fair to say that his Bitcoin related business plans have an initial appearance of being legit. However, as it turned out, the Bitcoin Banking System would only be used as a series of Potemkin Village building blocks for a massive Australian tax fraud in which Craig tried to obtain tens of millions in GST, Income Tax returns and R&D tax rebates. As we will discover, Craig’s Modus Operandi will be to cover every call out with a new, more brazen, lie or forgery, until the inevitable next implosion.
After meeting Jamie Wilson somewhere late 2011 or early 2012, and first helping Jamie with his business called CryptoLoc/YourDocumentFile, it appears Craig Wright had been discussing some of his Bitcoin related business ideas with Jamie too over the course of (late) 2012. Which lead to Jamie turning around to start working for Craig’s startup endeavor.
The only other notable events happening in 2012 are the formalization of Craig’s divorce from his wife Lynn Black and the dissolution of W&K Info Defense Research LLC on September 28, 2012. The company was dissolved by default Administrative Dissolution because Dave Kleiman did not file an Annual Report for 2011, most likely because he had no further use for the business after their four proposed projects were rejected by Homeland Security, which had been the sole purpose for the incorporation of the LLC in the first place. It would not be reinstated again until after his death.
These type of forgeries showcase the extreme lengths Craig Wright is willing to go to deceive his audience in and outside the courts of law.
January 8, 2013: Craig hires Jamie Wilson.
As said, Craig Wright teamed up with Jamie Wilson, who would be hired as CFO to help Craig set up his business endeavors. However, Jamie would not stay long in that position, as he eventually realised that Craig was executing a multi-million-dollar fraud over the course of 2013. More about that later.
“Q: And you started in August of 2013, right?
A: No, no. I didn’t. If you have a look it was January, 8 of January, 2013. So that Christmas party that we asked before —
Q: Hold on, go ahead.
A: That would have been in December. So that does work out.
Q: So, the date on this, this goes, the date then the month then the year?
A: Yes.
Q: So, why is your resignation say here then November, 2013, if you resigned in October?
A: That would have been Craig or who, or his bookkeeper who looked after the accounts. I would not have processed my own termination pay because I never received the payment.
Q: Okay. But you were scheduled to be one of the highest employees, paid employees of this company, correct?
A: Yes.
Q: So, it is January, you are saying that you were employed January 8th of 2013.
A: Yes.
Q: And how many people started the company, well I guess with you?
A: Well Ramona Watts. His wife. Myself and Craig.
Q: Okay.
A: And then I would live in Brisbane; Craig lives in Sydney. All of the business was done out of Sydney. I was flying back and forward. Craig was then on-boarding other people around him to start up Hotwire PE.
Q: Okay. So, for nine months — strike that. So in April Dave dies?
A: Yes.
Q: You stay on with Hotwire in May, right?
A: Yes.
Q: You stay on in June, right? You stay on in July. You stay on all of the way until October or November?
A: 23rd of October my resignation.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson
February 11, 2013: Craig wins administrative appeal against ATO.
Since Craig Wright produces forgeries by the boatloads, and then some, we are always sceptical when new material supporting Craig’s case ‘leaks’. But, as we explained earlier, when it comes to fakes and forgeries being exposed by investigators, it is always ‘I didn’t do that, I was hacked’ or, in this particular case with the ATO, ‘You were hacked, here’s where your network has vulnerabilities, let’s focus on those instead of my fraudulent rebate claims’.
Let’s presume for the moment though that the screenshots below are genuine. They come from the same February 18, 2019 article by Murray Distributed Technologies, discussed earlier. They try to claim that Craig Wright had been fighting with the ATO since 2009, furthering his ‘the ATO knew about my Bitcoin since 2009’ lie and, in a peculiar case of ‘the dog ate YOUR homework’, asserts the ATO was relying on evidence forged by themselves or a third-party, as a result of the ‘forensically proven’ network vulnerability, in order to discredit Craig. In Part 2 of this series we will see ATO coming back to these accusations.
Note that the Murray Distributed Technologies article was written before the full ATO reports became known, as these reports were only filed in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit in June 2020. The ATO reports will be quoted a lot in this article, and, unsurprisingly, they contain a full debunk of Craig’s ‘forensic evidence’.
It is in our opinion not a stretch to presume that this ‘win’ against the ATO’s attempted objections concerning his personal ‘Intellectual Property’ sale scheme which, by his own recent words asserting that GST was paid ‘on both sides’, would have netted him the opportunity to file for a not-insubstantial rebate, in early 2013 may have emboldened Craig Wright to think that he could push the tax authorities in Australia much more, especially when it comes to ramping up the number of ‘events’ that never happened, and at the same time substantially ramping up the monetary valuation of these ‘events’.
April 2013
Let’s move forward to April 2013, a pivotal month in Craig Wright’s Bitcoin fraud career. For example, we learn that Craig had paid a $250 donation to be mentioned on the Bitcoin Foundation website as a Lifetime Member. $250 is the author’s estimation of the USD equivalent of 2.7 BTC as found on Wayback Machine. However, it is unlikely that at this specific point in time that Craig already owned Bitcoin yet. He will obtain Bitcoin later this month, though, so there is a tiny possibility that he paid for the Lifetime Membership in BTC!
Why is there a tiny possibility that Craig Wright paid the Bitcoin Foundation Lifetime Membership with BTC? Because we know his trading activity on Mt Gox in April 2013, that’s where Craig Wright touched ‘physical’ Bitcoin for the first time in his life.
Note that Craig withdrew 1.8 + 1.8 = 3.6 BTC on April 24, 2013 which is the exact date of the Wayback Machine capture above. And since there are no earlier captures on Wayback Machine, there is technically the possibily that Craig paid Bitcoin Foundation on April 24, 2013 who immediately put Craig his name on their website, and coincidentally also a Wayback Machine capture was made on April 24, 2013.
How likely this exact line of events is?
We’ll let the readers judge for themselves.
No less than three other, more notable, events happened in the second half of April 2013.
- The Coin-Exch Pty Ltd company was incorporated in Australia, the first of a series of Bitcoin fraud related companies that, together with a few companies that Craig incorporated in 2009 and 2011, would form the Hotwire Group of companies.
- Craig Wright bought his first few handfuls of Bitcoin on Mt Gox. This is, as far as we know, the first time Craig actually touched Bitcoin. But just like the The Conversation comments, Craig never talks about this moment in his life. Telling?
- Dave Kleiman, his once-partner in the short-lived and failed 2011 business endeavor called W&K Info Defense Research LLC in the USA, passed away.
At first glance, these three events appear unrelated to each other, but in the following 12 months we will learn how they intertwine nevertheless. First, let’s break down the month of April 2013 day by day.
April 17, 2013: Craig incorporates Coin-Exch Ltd Pty in Australia.
April 22, 2013: Craig buys 42.3 BTC on Mt Gox.
April 24, 2013: Craig, on balance, sells 27.6 BTC on Mt Gox.
Craig Wright really started testing MtGox this day. He is using the withdraw functionality twice for 1.8 BTC each, he buys 10 BTC, he sells a lot more, and he deposits 0.57 BTC back into his Mt Gox wallet on this same day.
April 25, 2013: Craig buys 18 BTC on Mt Gox.
April 26, 2013: Dave Kleiman passes away.
“About two weeks before his grisly death, there was a change in Dave Kleiman. The formerly generous and lively computer forensics expert became confrontational and bitter. Around that time, Kleiman left the Veteran’s Affairs hospital where he’d been a patient, and called his close friend and business partner Patrick Paige to let him know. “They’ve decided to release you? That’s great,” Paige remembers asking.
“No,” Kleiman responded. “I told the doctors to go fuck themselves.””
Snippet from a great piece from Gizmodo: “The Strange Life and Death of Dave Kleiman, A Computer Genius Linked to Bitcoin’s Origins”
April 27, 2013: Craig buys 25.5 BTC on Mt Gox.
April 27, 2013: Craig publishes his first blog post about Bitcoin “A diatribe on Bitcoin”.
A revealing part of Craig Wright’s first Bitcoin post: “I’ve placed my bet”.
April 27, 2013: Craig publishes his second blog post about Bitcoin “Is hording really an issue with bitcoin?”.
April 28, 2013: Craig publishes his third blog post about Bitcoin “Why Bitcoins?”.
April 29, 2013: Craig publishes his fourth blog post about Bitcoin “Is Bitcoin volatile?”.
Because these four blog posts about Bitcoin in April 2013, after Craig Wright got redpilled on Mt Gox owning his first Bitcoins ever, reveal a lot about Craig’s mood and status with Bitcoin at that specific moment in time, he has (again) never mentioned these posts in public. Like his first noob comments on Bitcoin in July/August 2011, Craig clearly doesn’t want you to know that these early Bitcoin scribblings from his hand exist.
April 30, 2013: Craig receives message that Dave Kleiman has passed away.
April 30, 2013: Craig posts video “Dave Kleiman — RIP (1967–2013)” on YouTube.
Above is a link to the original video on Craig Wright’s YouTube account, however, only available on WayBack Machine as Craig had deleted his YouTube videos at some point. Below is a copy of this same video, uploaded in 2018 by YouTube user Crypto Me!, still available on YouTube.
And again we have found another public outing that Craig Wright never refers to in his conversations. Because, notably, and knowing what will come next (Craig creating an impressive amount of backdated emails, fake contracts and other forged digital documents, retroactively linking himself and Dave Kleiman to the early days of Bitcoin), in this video Craig doesn’t mention Bitcoin even once, let alone his supposed “partnership” with Dave Kleiman in creating Bitcoin.
Under Craig Wright’s original YouTube video on WayBack Machine we can find the comment below (posted May 8, 2013), with a reply from Craig himself on the same day. Kursten (Merie) Karr is now one of the Fact Witnesses in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, and she is likely to make an appearance in November 2021 during the Jury Trial.
Kursten, who knew Dave Kleiman intimately since 1998 till he died in April 2013, is known to have stated:
“During the whole time I knew David [= Dave Kleiman], he never mentioned or spoke to me about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. […] David never described Craig Wright as his business partner or mentioned that they had business interests together.”
April 30, 2013: Craig posts an In Memoriam about Dave Kleiman on his blog, simply called “Dave Kleiman”.
While, sure, apologists for Craig Wright will claim that all of the above could be explained away as exceptionally good OpSec, intentionally devised to maintain distance between himself and any connection to Satoshi. What they can’t explain however is why NONE of the myriad of forged documents and false emails, backdated contracts and conflicting statements which Craig would later try to pass off as evidence of him being Satoshi Nakamoto, withstands even basic scrutiny.
Now, let’s circle back for a moment to Arthur van Pelt’s previous article (which could be seen as the sequel to this series of two articles) “The Craig Wright May 2016 Signing Sessions Debacle, In Full Context”. Those of you who read that epistle about another noteworthy timeframe in the Faketoshi saga (May 2015 — May 2016), might remember the following quote that was penned down:
“On a related sidenote, while talking about or examining Craig Wright’s forgeries, a list that has grown into the hundreds if not thousands by now, there is a rule of thumb that never fails so far.
This rule of thumb is:
Everything Craig Wright and Bitcoin dated before April 2013 is a forgery created after April 2013 (except for a handful of public comments online in July/August 2011 when Craig apparently had just learned about Bitcoin).”
And indeed, we have now arrived at the end of this, as said, pivotal month in Craig Wright’s Bitcoin fraud career. What follows is something we can touch upon somewhat indirectly, and only make educated guesses about. But fact is, “something changed", something that made Craig feel confident enough to unleash a massive tax fraud with Bitcoin as a scam tool, and during which he slowly started to roleplay Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. This roleplay, called out numerous times by a plethora of experts in all kinds of linguistic, technical, legal and social fields, unfortunately lasts till today. It is fair to say, we guess, that Craig Wright still needs to meet his master, most likely in one of the impressive amount of lawsuits he’s currently involved with.
It appears that the death of his former friend, combined with the fact that he owned his first Bitcoin in the same period, had clearly sparked an illicit idea for a Bitcoin scheme in Craig Wright — a scheme he believed would net him millions of dollars in R&D tax rebates and other refunds from AusIndustry and the Australian Taxation Office. But, first, he would need to craft a basis through which he could claim the group of Australian companies he’d incorporated had been funded for this supposed R&D expenditure in the first place, namely, he could resurrect the US based company Dave Kleiman had incorporated for their failed Homeland Security project pitches a couple of years earlier, assert that it had held extremely valuable Intellectual Property derived from millions of dollars in funding that he had personally loaned it, and then file a legal claim for ‘return’ of said valuable investments and assets. We will learn, of course, that said investments and assets never existed in the first place.
With Dave Kleiman dead there would be nobody to dispute his wild claims and with his burgeoning interest in Bitcoin, Craig Wright would have known exactly how to get around the fact there would be no bank records of actual cash having been paid to W&K Info Defense Research LLC. Thus began Craig’s practice of claiming ownership, without any evidence, of large amounts of Bitcoin, by simply searching the Bitcoin blockchain for suitable transactions and public addresses to fit the needs of his fraudulent enterprise.
May 3, 2013: Craig withdraws 43.9 BTC from Mt Gox.
June 2, 2013: Craig incorporates Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence Ltd Pty in Australia.
“Q: Can you talk to me about the type of intellectual property Craig was developing in 2013?
A: So, we set up Hotwire PE and it was all about setting up a banking platform, working with Rubik out of Sydney. The challenges were that it went to a decimal six spaces instead of what we have today being four. So unfortunately it couldn’t go ahead. At the time of October, so we started that around about June/July of 2013. And by October I actually had finished and resigned. All projects were related to Bitcoin, also setting up exchanges.
Q: Okay. So, was Craig involved in Bitcoin related intellectual property development in 2013?
A: Yes.”
June 26, 2013: Craig emails Jamie all the 2011 W&K projects info.
Remember, not one of these US Department of Homeland Security projects they pitched were Bitcoin related. DHS rejected all four of them and absolutely did not hire Craig Wright or Dave Kleiman, or fund them or the US business entity they had incorporated for the purpose, ‘W&K Info Defense Research LLC’. Craig, however, now begins his re-writing of their shared history to suit his new plans following Dave’s death.
June/July 2013: Craig changes his hoodies for fancy suits.
After Dave’s passing, a remarkable change is visible in Craig Wright’s appearance. Jamie Wilson describes what happened.
“Q: Did you notice a change in Craig from before and after Dave died?
A: Yes.
Q: Okay. Can you expand on what that change was?
A: The change was from Craig, as I stated before, being a developer, security, hoodie, you know, very much —
Q: Sorry.
A: You know, wearing hoodies and things like that, when I would have meetings down in Sydney, he would turn up and we’d go to a little cafe shop and things like that where the train station was. Once Dave had passed away and things started to get kicked off with these new companies, there was a matter of all of a sudden he had to dress in flash suits, you know, wear the best watches, shoes, fascination with socks. Even down to vehicles. He moved from his normal Subaru which was beaten up and went and got a brand new car. It was just a massive change in lifestyle. It wasn’t the Craig I originally met.
Q: So, I want to drill down on that a little bit more. Before Dave died you said Craig dressed in hoodies?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you expand a little bit more?
A: Yes, tee shirts, normal sort of developer sort of clothes. You could tell — I mean Craig is a very bright, very smart man.
Q: Right.
A: As I have said before, one of the greater futurists I have actually come across. But it was just disappointing to see the way the business was handled moving forward. And his arrogance, believing that he has got to change himself, I think just caused him a lot of problems.
Q: Beyond the physical change of going from hoodies to suits and expensive watches, did you see a change in his attitude at all?
A: Yes.
Q: Did he suddenly have confidence? What was the change?
A: Oh, the confidence went through the roof. It was a matter of I’m the man, I’m going to do this, this is the way I’m going to go about it. Whereas a lot more humble prior to Dave’s passing.
Q: And, how quickly after Dave’s passing did this happen?
A: I would have said June/July.
Q: Did you understand, did you ever come to have an understanding of why there was this sudden shift in his personality? Did it have to do with money or any, I mean, tell me, did you see any — strike that. Did you ever come to have an understanding of why there was a sudden, a massive shift in Craig’s outward appearance?
A: No.
Q: Okay.
A: It was only when time has gone by.
Q: Beyond flashy watches, suits, new cars, did you see any other sudden displays of wealth?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you expand on that?
A: I did have a Christmas party and Craig and Ramona joined us at the event that night. I mean, Craig was very much, you know, the best of the Champagne, top shelf, and out of a team of around about ten, there was about $15,000 spent on the evening, all paid by Craig.
Q: Was that something Craig would have done prior? Is that something you had seen Craig do prior to Dave’s death?
A: No, absolutely not. I mean, prior to Dave’s passing, I was the one buying the coffees and spending the money travelling back and forward.
Q: And then thereafter?
A: It was a matter of he would even fly his team up to Brisbane. We would all go out together. Craig would actually pay for everyone who came along.
Q: Did it appear to you that after Dave died, Craig had access to massive amounts of assets that he did not previously have before?
A: The money came from somewhere.
Q: Sorry, go ahead?
A: I believe that there was a change, and overnight he had a lot of wealth.
Q: Okay.
A: But, at the same time I know that he was in the very early stages of Bitcoin as well.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
Now where did this “overnight wealth" in June/July 2013 came from? Perhaps we can find an answer to that, knowing Craig Wright would be in the business of claiming massive tax returns in the upcoming years. When did Craig start receiving these tax refunds?
In one of their reports issued in 2014, the ATO provides an unambiguous hint, looking at the screenshot above, it suggests where Craig’s sudden wealth halfway through 2013 might have originated from.
“For the past 2 years […] 94% of your income or money to which you have access is comprised of GST or income tax refunds.”
Another clue is coming from a July 2, 2013 email from Craig Wright to Jamie Wilson, where they discuss the very early days of Hotwire, the NSW Supreme Court fraud, bookkeeping matters and…
“have done the initial GST […] processed and accepted by the ATO”.
It appears Craig had just prepared, and lodged, the first GST BAS refund for his new company ‘group’ headed by Hotwire PE, derived from the ‘valuable’ Intellectual Property he’d ‘recovered’ from W&K Info Defense. This Intellectual Property, remember, is not Bitcoin related but he has managed to convince Jamie Wilson that it is related to his ‘Bitcoin Banking System’ scheme.
On the same day, Craig Wright sends an email to his wife (with CC to Jamie Wilson), indicating that he is already thinking about spending “that money”…
All in all, it is not unlikely that the first (fraudulent) GST returns started to come in in the course of July 2013. In this case we have to presume that Craig Wright indeed lodged his first GST BAS on July 1, 2013 as he indicated in his email to Jamie Wilson on July 2, 2013. Since the ATO takes 12 days max to process GST BAS returns, and advises up to 5 days extra before refunds appear on the taxpayer’s bank account, then consequently Craig started to notice, to his pleasure, that his tax fraud appeared to be working as planned well before the end of the month of July 2013.
Lastly, what might have lifted his spirits also around this time was in narrowly avoiding bankruptcy in the aftermath of the 2003 — 2006 Ryan v Wright case, in which Craig was “chased through the courts” since 2006 by Mr McArdle.
Unknown in which month exactly, but in 2013 Wright settled the $425,000 bankruptcy notice with McArdle [with the first tax refunds maybe?], according to the December 11, 2015 The Australian — Business Review section — article below. And is it a stretch to suggest that this ‘Sword of Damocles’ hanging above Craig’s head since 2006 might have pressed him into thinking harder and harder of questionably legal, or outright criminal, ways to get rid of this debt?
In any event, the evidence shows that his tax refund schemes were certainly serving as remarkable income streams and disproportionate to any legitimate business activity his companies may have conducted, it certainly appears to have provided for a sufficiently large amount of disposable income, that he was finally able to meet his long-standing legal obligation to his DeMorgan debt.
July 1, 2013: Craig admits backdating invoices to July 1, 2013.
A rare occassion where Craig Wright admitted he wasn’t hacked, or where ex-staff or Greg Maxwell or Ira Kleiman or Anonymous (or whoever suits the occasion) altered his documents. Obviously this backdating by Craig “against Jamie Wilson’s advice” happened a bit later. But to understand the magnitude of Craig’s Potemkin Village early on:
- Tens of millions are created from thin air (as ATO would find out) by making up fake invoices. Some of these invoices would be addressed to DeMorgan (not to be confused with another DeMorgan company discussed earlier), a company that didn’t even exist yet.
- When the issuing company claims to have incurred deductible ‘costs’ (again created from thin air, as the ATO would also discover), then they reduce or entirely eliminate their tax liability from the income derived from the invoices issued.
- The receiving companies (also owned or otherwise controlled by Craig Wright) who will have no, or hardly any, income revenue, now have $9,619,869.29 GST in total to claim back as GST BAS refunds derived from the sales tax they claim they paid on those invoices.
- To give this fraudulent construction the appearance of legitimacy, Craig would start hiring staff, supposed to be paid from the first tax returns, hence the backdating needed to receive these GST BAS refunds as soon as possible.
- Rinse, and repeat. The tax fraud set up is born.
July 18, 2013: Craig sends email to ATO with ‘evidence’ of his Bitcoin holdings.
This is Wilson Exhibit 11 from the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Let’s have a look at how this email was discussed in court.
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I’m handing you what has been marked as Wilson 11. It was produced in this litigation as Defense 30127. Do you recognize this e-mail as an e-mail Craig sent to — with a cc: to you?
A: Yes.
Q: It is also sent to Mr. Dempster at the ATO?
A: Yes.
Q: And the subject is Evidence?
A: Yes.
Q: And in it there is a listing of companies, a Coin Exchange and CSW Personal?
A: Yes.
Q: With the Bitcoin holdings of 438,000 and 57,000?
A: Yes.
Q: The value of those Bitcoin on Mt. Gox which totals to 53.8 million.
A: Correct.
Q: Okay. And then, “My wallet is listed below.” Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you take this e-mail to — did you take this e-mail to tell you that — sorry, strike that. Did you understand from this e-mail that Craig owned and controlled over $53 million worth of Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: In fact, close to 500,000 Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you remember receiving this e-mail?
A: Yes.
Q. Did you ever talk to Craig about this e-mail?
A: It was ongoing conversations.
Q: Okay. All consistent with the story that, what?
A: All of these Bitcoin holdings.
Q: Okay. Did he ever tell you that this Bitcoin was locked in an inaccessible file to him?
A: No.
Q: Thank you, Mr. Wilson. So I can stop asking the question a million times, Mr. Wilson, did Craig ever tell you that Bitcoin he owned or controlled was locked in a file that he could not access?
A: No.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
Note that Craig Wright now claims to personally own and control 57,000 Bitcoin ‘not locked in a file’. Now let’s go back to April and May 2013, the only times so far, at this point in time, that Craig had traded a bit on Mt Gox. What we notice: at no point did Craig ever have more than some 50 Bitcoin in that timeframe! So that number 57,000 is made up, just like the number 438,857 for Coin-Exch, of course.
Another reason we know that these numbers have been made up, and Craig Wright never controlled a single Bitcoin of them, is the fact that he, apparently in support of his email, created two Bitcoin Wallet screenshot forgeries with transactions that never happened on the Bitcoin blockchain, according the BlockChair explorer.
Based on these forged images we can make an educated guess about one of the addresses, namely 1eHhgW6vquBYhwMPhQ668HPjxTtpvZGPC, that Craig Wright took from the Bitcoin rich list, and used to create these forgeries. The 1eHhg address never had one transaction on July 18, 2011, but as it happens, the total transacted on that address (474,320.43 BTC) is exactly what Craig claims happened in one transaction in his 2011 wallet forgery!
However… Oops.
“That address was confirmed to be a MtGox address by Mark Karpeles moving 424,242.42424242 on June 23, 2011. Absolutely zero to do with CSW.” — Twitter user Jingles
We will soon learn more of these Bitcoin rich list addresses that Craig randomly picked and used in his scammery. Keep reading…
The $57 million NSW Supreme Court fraud kicks off
We’ve now entered the phase where Craig Wright really starts executing on his fraudulent Bitcoin scheme that would continue with a Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay starting some six months later.
July 25, 2013: Craig files the first of two fraudulent claims of $28 million against W&K Info Defense Research LLC at the New South Wales Supreme Court.
And here we find Craig Wright unleash the most outrageous nonsense over the dead body of his ‘friend’ Dave Kleiman. The following screenshot is an exemplar of how the rest of the Faketoshi saga, a fascinating fairy tale of epic proportions, will unfold.
- There were never “contract labour services”.
- Craig Wright never loaned money to Dave Kleiman.
- There was never a “contract dated 27 October 2008”.
It goes on and on like this in the filing. It is sad and disturbing to realize how readily Craig Wright is rewriting and exploiting a dead person’s reputation for his own financial benefits. And this will not remain the only time either in this timeframe, unfortunately. In Part 2 we will meet another dead person that is also being actively exploited after he passed away: Professor David Rees.
August 1, 2013: “a W&K shareholders meeting was called”.
This event is mentioned in an Affidavit that Craig Wright filed at the NSW Supreme Court early November 2013 to support his $57 million in claims case against W&K Info Defense Research LLC. Let’s unravel the dirty trick that Craig is executing here.
- Craig Wright is falsely claiming he is 50% shareholder of W&K. In reality, Dave Kleiman always had been 100% shareholder.
- The shareholders meeting was not about W&K but about Hotwire (but, as Jamie Wilson recalls, some matters around W&K were indeed discussed).
- Jamie Wilson, without his consent as he had resigned already by November 2013, was retroactively made Director of W&K by Craig Wright.
- Unbeknownst to Jamie Wilson, who no longer worked for or with Craig at this point, he is the person Craig claims ‘approves’ the winding down of W&K and the acceptance of the debt positions (the $57 million in contrived IP that Craig was needing to magic up for his Australia-based tax rebate fraud).
And indeed, Jamie Wilson was not aware this had all happened in this capacity, as he declared under oath to Ira Kleiman’s head lawyer Vel Freedman during his deposition on November 8, 2019:
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I’m handing you what has been marked as Wilson 14. It is Document 83–4. If you open that up Mr. Wilson and take a look, do you recognize this as an affidavit Craig Wright submitted to the Supreme Court of New South Wales?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you turn to Paragraph 23?
A: Yes.
Q: In it Craig writes, “On first of August 2013 a shareholders meeting was called for W&K Info Defense LLC to be held on the 16th of August 2013. “The meeting was e-mailed to the company address as well as sent to the address of the shareholders and company.” “The shareholding of W&K Info Defense LLC was Craig S. Wright 50 percent; David A. Kleiman 50 percent.” And in Paragraph 24, “The meeting from Point 23, the meeting was held on the 16th of August 2013. “The following people were present. Jamie Wilson, Craig S. Wright.” Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: Did this meeting ever occur?
A: Yes.
Q: What happened at that meeting?
A: Craig said to me that with David’s passing that we needed to do the paperwork for him to turn around and take full control and resolve the issue of David being on the, as a shareholder. To be honest, at that stage I had no, I didn’t have the knowledge or understanding of what it all meant, because the motions were already happening with the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
Q: So, if you look at the next page, “The following points were moved at the meeting: “One, Jamie Wilson will act as a director for purposes of consenting to orders and the company to be wound down. The vote was Craig Wright yes; no other parties. It was agreed that filing the motion to accept the debt owned by company W&K Info Defense LLC would be closed.” Do you recall this happening?
A: This is my first knowledge that I was acting as a director of the U.S. company.
Q: So, this is the first time — so, let me break that down a little bit. You do recall the meeting happening; is that correct?
A: It was part of our meeting that day and it was around Hotwire PE.
Q: Okay.
A: Not so much W&K.
Q: So, you remember the meeting happening. Is it accurate to say that you remember the meeting happening, but you don’t remember being made a director of W&K?
A: Absolutely.
Q: Okay. So then you would agree with the characterization in 24, Paragraph 24 that there was a meeting. Present, Jamie Wilson and Craig S. Wright were there?
A: Yes.
Q: But is it accurate to say you would disagree with what happened in Paragraph 26?
A: Yes. This is my first that I am being made aware that I was a director of the LLC company.”
“Q: Mr. Wilson, can you take a look at Plaintiffs' Exhibit 1 for me, or Wilson 1 for me. And, those are the resignation letters?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you read the companies you resigned from?
A: Coin Exchange, Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence, Interconnect Research and Integers.
Q: I noticed that, and actually you noticed, Mr. Wilson, during a break you mentioned this to us, that there was missing, W&K was missing from the resignation.
A: That’s correct.
Q: Why is that?
A: Because I didn’t even know I was a director.
MR. FREEDMAN: No further questions.
MR. PASCHAL: No further questions. All right, I think we are done.”
Ultimately, this fraudulent set up by Craig Wright of a line of events that had never happened — followed by boatloads of other lies, false promises and meanwhile providing more forgeries to the Kleiman estate in the course of 2014 to 2017 by Craig — in his desperate attempt to claim the title of Satoshi so he could convince a, now extremely sceptical ATO, that he did, indeed, own hundreds and hundreds of thousands of BTC, will lead to Ira Kleiman, brother and heir of the deceased Dave Kleiman, igniting a multi-billion fraud lawsuit against Craig Wright in February 2018. At the moment of writing, this case is still running, with jury trial to be expected in November 2021.
August 11, 2013: Jamie Wilson emails a business status overview.
At first glance, this all appears pretty legit. If only the way of funding was legit too… But Jamie Wilson makes one thing clear about this email. What’s the common theme, Jamie?
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I’m handing you what has been marked as Wilson 15. It was produced in this litigation as Defense 43726. Take a moment. Do you recognize this as an e-mail you sent to Craig and Ramona Watts?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you explain to me what this e-mail is?
A: These were all of the projects that Craig wanted to work on. 5/5, Hotwire and the increase in staff in a short period of time.
Q: So, these were all intellectual property projects?
A: Yes.
Q: And they all related to Bitcoin? What did they relate to? What did all of the projects relate to — strike that. Was there a common theme between all of these projects?
A: Yes.
Q: What was the common theme between all of the intellectual property projects that Hotwire was working on?
A: It was Bitcoin.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
August 12, 2013: Craig incorporates Integyrz Pty Ltd in Australia. An ever-so-slightly different spelling of a previously incorporated company of his, ‘Integyrs’.
August 13, 2013: Craig files the second fraudulent claim of almost $29 million against W&K Info Defense Research LLC at the New South Wales Supreme Court.
The two false claims against W&K now total almost $57 million. Meanwhile, more lies and nonsense is added to the list:
- Craig Wright loaned Bitcoin to Dave Kleiman. Never happened.
- Software and SDK (Software Development Kit) development. Another false claim. Never happened.
- We notice a contract being mentioned, dated January 8, 2009, that never could have existed.
- And we find Craig’s signature spelling mistakes, identifiers of his sloppiness (“to the defendant to the defendant”).
We’re sure the reader now, while only looking at the tip of an immense fraud iceberg, gets a feeling for why Ira Kleiman, the brother of the deceased Dave Kleiman, was not amused anymore at some point, and decided to drag Craig into court early 2018 for all this fraud because, after all, if Craig was Satoshi and, as he’d previously claimed in his initial emails to the Kleiman estate, had developed Bitcoin with Dave, even sharing mining rewards which would now be worth fantastically large amounts of money, it was apparent that Craig may be subsequently guilty of robbing the estate of their rightful Bitcoin and IP!
August 23, 2013: Craig incorporates W&K Company Pty Ltd in Australia.
This appears to have been done in support of his scheme to obtain the non-existing Intellectual Property of W&K Info Defense Research LLC. In the end, Craig Wright didn’t need this Australian company and never used it for anything, as far as we know.
August 25, 2013: Craig incorporates Interconnected Research Pty Ltd in Australia.
August 26, 2013: Craig incorporates another four companies in Australia.
- Pholus Pty Ltd
- Denariuz Pty Ltd
- Zuhl Pty Ltd
- The Trustee for the Wright Family Trust
By now, the foundation has been laid for the Hotwire group of companies, that Craig will use to attempt to defraud AusIndustry and ATO for millions of multiple types of tax rebates for projects that only existed on paper. We will learn that Craig’s original ideas around the “Bitcoin Banking System” have been pulled apart and are spread over the several entities that Craig had incorporated in the course of 2013. The common theme is, as we learned from Jamie Wilson earlier: Bitcoin.
September 15, 2013: Craig announces the Hotwire Group on his blog.
With several hints like “Fifteen years of planning;” (starting 1998), “Four years of development;” (starting 2009: note that this is somewhat of a crippled link to Satoshi Nakamoto, as Satoshi started development of Bitcoin in 2007, while Craig indeed incorporated Information Defense in 2009 as the reader might remember, a company that Craig apparently incorporates in the Hotwire group at this point in time) and “In the next nine months, secrets will start to come out.”, Craig is apparently slowly preparing the world for his Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay. However, we will learn that the world, to Craig’s frustration, didn’t pay attention too much to this cosplay for at least two years from here…
September 20, 2013: Email from Jamie Wilson to Craig Wright.
The screenshot of this email is added to this article as an example of how Craig was setting up his multi-million tax fraud. It appears that around this time, Craig “I am adding BTC as inventory for now” Wright had been researching the Bitcoin blockchain for public addresses with large, sometimes dormant, holdings already.
Also, have a look at the numbers being discussed. Amount paid totals to shy of $78.5 million.
September 23, 2013: Craig claims to control a little over 1 million Bitcoin.
And notable, at this point in time, these “little over 1 million Bitcoin” (which were allegedly the mined Bitcoin, we will learn during an ATO hearing on February 26, 2014 in Part 2) are not locked away in inaccessible, encrypted, multi-layered Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme files send to offshore Panamanian, sorry UK, sorry Singapore, sorry Seychelles it is, trusts with Craig Wright as beneficiary, sorry, not beneficiary it is, and about a dozen “I am lawyer” trustees who forgot that Dave Kleiman told them they had to send bonded couriers with one, no five, no seven, no seventeen, whatever, we lost count how many encrypted key slices in January 2020.
Instead, Craig had “control” over them. Interesting.
Which is also confirmed by another source. Because, what did Jamie Wilson tell Vel Freedman during his deposition on November 8, 2019?
“Q: Mr. Wilson, I am handing you what has been marked as defense, sorry, as Wilson Exhibit 10. It was produced in this litigation as Defense Australia 113043. If you take a look, do you see the e-mail at the top of the page, this is a — do you recognize this as an e-mail that Craig sent to you?
A: Yes.
Q: It also went to Roger Manu of Rubik?
A: Correct.
Q: In it Craig says, “XBT Bitcoin is a currency. There are 11 million Bitcoin. Look at the exchange rate in XE.com.” And then, “We control what is, all up, a little over 1 million Bitcoin.” Do you see that?
A: Correct.
Q: Do you recall receiving this e-mail?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you believe by receiving this e-mail that Craig controlled over 1 million Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: Was this statement that he controlled, all up, a little over 1 million Bitcoin consistent with other statements that Craig had told you?
A: Yes.
Q: Did Craig ever tell you that this over 1 million Bitcoin was locked in a file that he could not access?
A: No.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
Coincidentally, highly anticipated discussions about the possible holdings of Satoshi Nakamoto had started five months earlier, in April 2013, ignited by Sergio Demian Lerner on Bitcointalk. It is not unlikely that Craig Wright had come across these discussions, as his email contains the exact same number that Sergio mentions.
“My estimation is that [Satoshi Nakamoto] owns more than 1M BTC, or 100M USD at current change.”
A few days later, on April 17, 2013, Sergio repeats the same estimation in a blog post.
“I estimate at eyesight that Satoshi fortune is around 1M Bitcoins, or 100M USD at current exchange rate.”
To add, Sergio’s research into the Satoshi stash is an easy inference to draw for another reason too: during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, when Craig Wright was requested to come up with a list of public addresses that he supposedly mined in 2009 and 2010, he (incompetently) copied the same filtering criteria that Sergio had been using in previous years. Craig’s nChain colleague Steve Shadders then used these crippled Lerner criteria in 2019 for the creation of the so-called “Shadders List". The full breakdown of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit is, of course, another story for another day.
September 25, 2013: Craig sends email about Sukuriputo Okane project.
This email can be found in a June 3, 2019 post on Craig’s blog. At first glance, it’s an impressively smart looking email from a very bright Bitcoin architect-level developer. But is Craig Wright even such person?
No, of course not. He never was, and he never will be. Because at second glance, one finds out that the meat of this email is simply copied from the Bitcoin Wiki. For example, some of the text is taken — both in paraphrase and verbatim form — from the Bitcoin Wiki Contract page, set up in 2012.
The screenshot of the email from Craig’s blog:
This is, plain and simple, plagiarism, of which Craig once, in June 2008, said “Plagiarism is more serious than most people think. It is a criminal breach of both the copyright act and is also a criminal fraud.” in the comments to his blog article “Tisk, tisk, tisk…” (scroll down a little for the comments section).
And now that we’re on it anyway, this exact same text has been re-used by Craig in a (backdated to April 5, 2013) chat correspondence with Mark Ferrier to support the false MJF Mining story (see September 27, 2013 after the next image).
September 27, 2013: Australian media outlets ABC Net and The Australian report that Mark Ferrier, the son of a prominent insolvency expert, has been arrested for a year-long series of frauds which netted him several hundred thousand dollars.
Insolvency expert’s son held for fraud
THE 37-year-old son of Ian Ferrier, one of Australia’s most prominent insolvency specialists, has been arrested in Perth after an alleged year-long fraud spree in Western Australia that netted more than $500,000.
Mark James Ferrier’s alleged victims included hotels, aviation and mining companies, lawyers, old school mates and vehicle and heavy equipment distributors as he purported to be a successful mining consultant and contractor setting up business.
Mr Ferrier was arrested by fraud squad detectives on Wednesday morning and is expected to be extradited to Queensland.
He has been on the run since November 2011, and it is understood he has been using aliases, including Mark James Montiford-O’Brien.
Ian Ferrier, chairman of BRI Ferrier, said he was unaware that his son had been arrested as he had not had contact with him in recent years.
Mr Ferrier said he had been told recently his son had used his name to win the confidence of his alleged targets. “It’s all very disappointing to hear of this,” he said.
Mark Ferrier set up MJF Mining Contractors, under his own name, which struck a deal with listed miner Paynes Find Gold in June. Under the deal, Mr Ferrier would upgrade mining and processing operations at Paynes Find’s mine 400km northeast of Perth in return for 50 per cent of the gold recovered.
The company’s shares shot up more than 300 per cent after the announcement amid higher than normal trading volume in the junior miner’s stock.
Paynes Find Gold chief executive Carl Popal alleged the company had been deceived by Mr Ferrier but stressed that no directors or related parties had traded in the stock. “This is so unbelievable. He sat in front of geologists, lawyers and the board as we did the deal,” Mr Popal said.
Using the agreement with Paynes Find, Mr Ferrier allegedly convinced several companies and individuals to work for, and supply equipment to, MJF Mining Contractors on good faith that they would be paid. To date, none of these companies has been paid, according to one of Mr Ferrier’s alleged victims.
Mr Ferrier created a lifestyle on his Facebook profile, posting photographs of a luxury residence, a motor cruiser, various trucks and heavy equipment that he claimed to own. “In reality, he had nothing. He didn’t even own a car or hold a driver’s licence,” alleged a former associate, who declined to be named.”
We will see in Part 2 that Craig, never one to pass up an opportunity to re-write history, after learning in the press of Mark Ferrier’s litany of fraudulent business dealings, conjures up a series of purported business deals of himself with Mr Ferrier, during his efforts to convince the ATO of his totally-not-made-up Bitcoin holdings.
That last part should be read with a healthy dose of irony, of course.
Fact is, there is no evidence to show that Craig even had contact with Mr Ferrier at all, let alone conducted sizeable business deals with him. What there is, instead, is a trail of evidence discovered by the ATO of Craig spinning off another arm of his complex web of lies, through pretend contracts and contacts, fake software and supposed business partners who, when questioned, confirmed they absolutely had nothing to do with any of the supposed deals with Craig or his Potemkin Village companies. What you will read, in Part 2 of this magnum opus, is how Craig was even caught out buying domain names he then pretended were the legit support desk operations for the fake banking software he pretended he’d paid for with some of his vast Bitcoin wealth.
And to give the reader a taste already of how that works with Craig Wright’s forgeries, here’s an example of what appears to be an email send to Craig from the ‘Accounts’ department of MJF Mining on August 15, 2013.
However, the domain ‘mjfminingservices.com’ was only (re-)created on November 22, 2013. Recreated? Yes, recreated. On October 16, 2012, this domain was created for the first time (allegedly by Mark Ferrier himself) but after a year abandoned without ever any activity related to it. As it appears, when Craig Wright started to ride along the MJF Mining news to create another Potemkin Village to advance his Australian tax fraud, he obtained this domain and started creating forged emails on them.
And the fraud that Craig Wright committed with this email forgery doesn’t stop here either. Let’s have a look at the following screenshot. It’s a so called whale transaction of 180,000 BTC on the Bitcoin blockchain on March 7, 2014. We see five addresses on the left being emptied (check the link to the block explorer under the screenshot), and the total of 180,000 BTC is arriving at the address starting with ‘1KecDY’ on the right.
Now let’s have a closer look at the five addresses on the left. Did you notice that four of them are mentioned in Craig Wright’s email forgery?
- 12HddUDLhRP2F8JjpKYeKaDxxt5wUvx5nq: Yes
- 16Ls6azc76ixc9Ny7AB5ZPPq6oiEL9XwXy: Yes
- 1P3S1grZYmcqYDuaEDVDYobJ5Fx85E9fE9: Yes
- 1cXNTyXj4xPGopfYZNY5xfSM1EPJJvBZV: No
(but go look under October 9, 2013 where Craig Wright is using this address in another email with an overview of addresses that he claims to control) - 12HddUDLhRP2F8JjpKYeKaDxxt5wUvx5nq: Yes
If you find the time, please go read this February 27, 2018 article “Kleiman v Craig Wright: The bitcoins that never were” from the well respected WizSec Bitcoin Security Specialists. Note that you will find back the addresses listed above as “Mt Gox cold storage” addresses!
To cut a long story short about this forgery, all these 140,000 BTC (180,000 -/- 40,000 of the ‘1cXNT’ address not mentioned in this forgery) from the Mt Gox early 2014 cold storage series of addresses, after being split several times over several adresses to end up in chunks of 50 BTC each by June 2014, ultimately ended up as packages of around 2,000 BTC each in one of the current 2022 Mt Gox cold storage addresses. Mr Nobuaki Kobayashi, the Japanese bankruptcy trustee of Mt Gox, is supervising these Mt Gox cold storage addresses, which can be found on CryptoGround’s Mt Gox Cold Wallet Address Monitor.
So what happened here: while Craig Wright pretended in 2013 that he owned and controlled these four addresses with 140,000 BTC in total, and had send the private keys of these addresses to Mark Ferrier of MJF Mining, the actual truth was: those four addresses factually belonged to Mt Gox, and after they went bankrupt in February 2014, during the recovery process of the bankruptcy procedure, these 140,000 BTC (and also the 40,000 BTC from the 1cXNT address, of course) moved away from the old Mt Gox cold storage — which obviously needs a private key — to end up in the current cold storage of Mt Gox that will be used by the Mt Gox trustee when the time has come to pay back the creditors of Mt Gox!
And this is how we debunked this Craig Wright forgery from two (and in Part 2 of this series we will find further detailing to number three) different angles:
- the Craig made forgery to support the MJF Mining story contains a domain that didn’t exist in August 2013;
- the Craig made forgery to support the MJF Mining story contains several Bitcoin addresses that Craig Wright provably didn’t control, but instead simply had picked randomly from the Bitcoin rich list. And in the latter case Craig — unknowingly — made the mistake to pick not-so-random Bitcoin addresses, as they would become part of a high profile bankruptcy case within months after creating this MJF Mining forgery, making it much easier to follow the online tracks of the holdings on these addresses in the Bitcoin blockchain;
- the whole MJF Mining story was created from thin air anyway by Craig Wright, as the ATO will determine after a thorough inquiry.
September 27, 2013: Craig informs about three upcoming private rulings.
It is currently unknown which three private rulings Craig Wright is referring to, as the evidence only provides information about only one private ruling around this timeframe: an ATO ruling about the nature of Bitcoin. This private ruling was indeed expected in September, but was according Craig only provided in December 2013, causing another point of friction and obfuscation between Craig Wright and the ATO in 2014.
October 2, 2013: Craig wants to teach ATO how BTC works.
At the same time, he declares that “The group I head has a holding of $AU 100,000,000 in XBT (Bitcoin).”
The numbers are growing fast, it appears. Did Craig find enough dormant Bitcoin addresses on the blockchain in the meantime to back this claim up?
October 4, 2013: The ATO troubles for Hotwire start.
An ATO Refund Integrity audit involving Hotwire (the ABN number 48 164 068 348 mentioned) has started, it appears. This is only 3 months after the first lodgement of GST, and only within 3 weeks after the startup of the Hotwire group! We accuse the ATO sometimes of being slow, but here they obviously make up for that. Or was Craig Wright already a taxpayer with a special status at ATO based on experiences with his tax claims in previous fiscal years? At all times, this late 2013 Refund Integrity audit turned out to be the kickoff of a years long, extremely thorough inquiry into Craig’s tax claims and overall business dealings, ultimately leading to a total dismantling of his Bitcoin fraud empire. And this case is very likely still not closed either for Craig, as in 2018 he was still under criminal inquiry by the ATO Criminal Investigations unit.
October 6, 2013: Craig responds to the Refund Integrity audit.
Only two of apparently seven emails are provided in the public court docket of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Email one:
And the numbers keep growing again in email two:
“We have a capitalisation in the group of $230 million […] We control $165 million in XBT (Bitcoin).”
Wow. Craig Wright goes from almost bankrupt, in need of settling a debt of $425,000 with Mr McArdle, arising from the decade-long pursuit of the amount he owed following the 2003 DeMorgan debacle, to a capitalisation of $230 million, within a few months. Amazing.
Except for the fact that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it looks simply like Craig has been merely handpicking random public Bitcoin addresses from the Bitcoin rich list, and claiming “I own this”. Truth is, even to this day Craig has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary.
October 7, 2013: Craig’s first Bitcoin supercomputer “Sukuriputo Okane” enters the scene!
Here we find the first of several (fake) projects that Craig Wright set up to scam the ATO. ATO however was quick to find out that “much of the application is taken from internet sources, without acknowledgement” and that the examples of the R&D activities were also “taken, unacknowledged, from an internet source”.
The reader only needs to scroll back to September 25, 2013 to know what ATO is talking about.
And these are signature moves from Craig Wright again, as we will see this type of plagiarism, literally copy-pasting from internet sources, is going through Craig’s fraud career as a fine red thread. And would the supercomputer disaster stop here? Don’t count on it…
October 9, 2013: Craig is being notified by the ATO that a refund is being retained.
Now that would have hurt, we’re sure. Only a few months into the tax fraud, with Hotwire ramping up hiring personnel and Craig living the dandy life, and suddenly ATO starts cutting Craig’s most important source of income (94%, remember?) already. This signal from the ATO will have substantial consequences within a matter of months. We will come back to this in Part 2.
October 9, 2013: Craig opens up about the Bitcoin addresses he claims to control.
This email is for a plethora of reasons hilarious. Read it, and weep.
Just a few of the notable things:
- “The addresses are in my control now as a matter of fate and circumstances.”
- our Faketoshi unraveled in one simple quote. - The address “16cou” has been signed “Craig is a liar and a fraud” in 2019. Evidence of that signing a little further down this article, as the “16cou" address will pop up in more forgeries.
- The address “1Feex” contains the Bitcoin stolen from Mt Gox on March 1, 2011. We will come back to that too. But it is hilarious to note that as early as 2013, Craig already claimed ownership of this address, without knowing its history (as Mt Gox database research would only start in 2014, and publications about the origins and history of the “1Feex” address would only follow much later).
- We notice the 12ib7 address that Craig Wright still claims to own, and is part, together with the 1Feex address, of a lawsuit against the Bitcoin developers, the so-called Pineapple Hack case.
- The Mt Gox addresses that we just saw under September 27, 2013 (starting with 16Ls6, 1cXNT and 12Hdd) are also mentioned.
And as if this wasn’t enough already, the ATO figured also something out about this email (see red box in the email). Craig was not only shamelessly lying in the content of the email, he also put a forged image inside the email, as a digital cherry on top of the fraud cake.
October 10, 2013: Craig speaks at DATACON Sydney conference.
Remarkably, this speech at the Hilton, Sydney appears not to have been Bitcoin but cybersecurity related, although Craig advertised this event on the Hotwire website.
Note how Craig called himself “Vice President” of Australia — Asia Pacific, Global Institute for Cybersecurity & Research (GICSR). More about that in Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2… (but to give a hint already, it’s not going to end well again).
October 12, 2013: Craig responds to the ongoing Refund Integrity audit.
Note that a Statutory Declaration by Stephen D’Emilio is mentioned as an attachment, this document will be shown a bit later (and thoroughly debunked, of course). Also note that now another Bitcoin number “we have confirmed control of” is mentioned: 111,114 BTC. It appears as if Craig is now fully introduced to the Bitcoin rich list, and adjusts the numbers as he went ahead.
October 23, 2013: Jamie Wilson resigns from his CFO position.
Jamie Wilson’s career with Craig’s Hotwire group was, as said earlier, shortlived. As Jamie started to notice an “uncomfortable and troubling” pattern in Craig’s business dealings. In his deposition, Jamie explains:
“Q: Okay. And then as we have just seen you have resigned in October of 2013.
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell me why you resigned?
A: The reason for it is that I wasn’t feeling comfortable with the position of what was happening and not understanding everything behind the documentation and the accounts. That was the purpose of it. And also at the same time my ex-wife had medical issues as well.
Q: Okay. Can you explain to me a little bit more what you meant, what you mean by you weren’t comfortable with what was going on in the documentation.
A: Well, in the lead up to my resignation, and it would have been over a 12-month period, Craig did set up these companies. And I was working with Craig, prior being on the board of White Ear and as an advisor to us in regards to development. But, my trouble was, and it was exciting moving in with him to start working on the new projects. But, where I didn’t feel comfortable is Craig’s change of attitude from a developer that would be in hoodies and, you know, very low key and working with, to one that, that is it, I’ve got to be the man, I’ve got to be the CEO, new flash suits, ties, and it was just a massive change from where he was conservative to right out there. Also I didn’t agree on the employment of the staff and the buildup of these companies without understanding, the full understanding, of where the funding was coming from. So, I know there was a lot of Bitcoin there. However, when I started to have a look at the R&D and the claiming of the R&D, research and development, for the Australia federal government I didn’t feel comfortable when I noticed that these amounts were from a U.S., and at that time and I am still not aware if the money actually was funded by the U.S. government. And I thought, well hang on, the Supreme Court of Australia has turned around and brought this IP into Australia, and now Craig is turning around and claiming the R&D on this money, that was paid by the U.S. government. And I thought, this to me looks fraud. And, I want nothing to do with it.
Q: So, you resigned?
A: I resigned. And since then I have had many times with the Australia taxation office, coming and investigate where I had to give evidence and the breakdown of it, purely because of, they put me under a microscope, the ATO.
Q: And has the ATO found that you did anything wrong?
A: No, no.
Q: Okay. I am, and ATO is the Australia Tax Office?
A: Taxation Office.
Q: Okay.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)
On a related sidenote, it will not surprise anyone, we are sure, that Jamie Wilson is just one of numerous people (ranging from Greg Maxwell to Ira Kleiman to Anonymous and many, many others, including the ATO organization) accused by Craig Wright of hacking him, and altering existing documents or even creating fraudulent documents from scratch.
Quotes from Craig’s blog post:
“Going right back to Jamie Wilson, who fabricated documents as CFO and then left me without even giving me access to all of the documents he had been working on, the story has been one of individuals who think they deserve more than the salary that they are being paid. [from Jamie Wilson’s deposition however: “I never got paid, never received a cent. It was supposed to be an annual salary of what is here, 150,000. But it never commenced. So, I got a tax bill for money I never received.”] Multiple staff members of Hotwire sought to put the company into liquidation and force such a scenario. At one point, Jamie Wilson had made a deal with people in New York in 2013 to sell both my intellectual property and my bitcoin. Mr Wilson was never involved with Dave Kleiman, had never met him nor had any association with anything to do with him. He was CFO of Hotwire, an Australian Company I founded between June 2013 and Nov 2013.
You wonder why he was fired.
I use companies for a reason. Unlike personal arrangements, you can set up structures that cannot easily be bypassed. As an example, my dealings with FASV where I created a set of intellectual property that was patented jointly with Jamie were conducted with the company I owned called Panopticrypt.
Luckily, Mr Wilson had no idea of the corporate requirements of the company. As such, his assignment documents that he filed are easily invalidated.”
Now note that Craig Wright is stating:
“You wonder why [Jamie Wilson] was fired.”
This is obviously Craig lying again, as Jamie Wilson resigned on his own initiative on October 23, 2013. There should be no glimpse of a doubt about this fact, as Jamie repeated this several times under oath in his deposition, supported by four pieces of evidence (one shown here):
Craig Wright wouldn’t be Craig Wright of course, if he didn’t also accuse Jamie Wilson of fraudulent activities during a deposition in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Craig has no shame lying inside a courtroom, under oath, or writing false declarations under penalty of perjury. Which is telling about what he is capable of outside a courtroom, isn’t it?
This behavior is part of a con man strategy called “You got something (innocence) I do not; I gonna make you equal.”. A more popular version of this mantra, sometimes appointed to Machiavelli, is “Accuse your enemy of that which you’re guilty of yourself.” to obfuscate, divide and conquer. We have to give it to Craig; this works well for him, to a certain extent.
“A: The HTC phone was actually a company phone that was run by a number of people in the system engineering department. It was designed to have apps that we were developing run on it. I did not realise that after I had given it back to the company, after doing some demonstrations, that I had not wiped it, which would allow people to keep using my e-mail and have access to other such things. On top of that, there are IP addresses associated with Big Pond and other accounts in Brisbane. The Brisbane IP addresses are not mine. Some of those are associated with Jamie Wilson and other people. Jamie Wilson was working with a person that I fired and also Jamie Wilson has fabricated a number of documents, such as a power of attorney over the patent that I created. He has fraudulently created assignment documents to file the patent in America and has actually used my signature, if we call it that, to file those documents. Investigation of the documentation from the lawyers has turned up that some of the signatures that are on some of my documents — ‘my’ — turn out to be signed by someone else’s hand. Some of that hand in some of the early ones also happens — which I have not gone over with my lawyers in full detail yet and I will not here — to match Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson seeks to keep IP that is not his. Other people in my company sought to sell some of the intellectual property that I was working on. We have documented exchanges between some of the people who were let go and companies, including a French bank, for the sale of intellectual property. Jamie Wilson had potentially a deal for $100 million. If that deal had gone through and he had managed to get access to the intellectual property, some of the staff members, including some of the development and coding staff, would have been cut in on the deal. The IP addresses of each of those machines, of course, is suspect.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright (deposition March 18, 2020)
And, as always, Craig Wright didn’t follow up with an inquiry, filing a police report, let alone that he sued Jamie Wilson, or anyone else for that matter, for this supposed doctoring of documents and other fraud.
November 4, 2013: Craig files affidavit at New South Wales Supreme Court.
For who’s interested, please check out the link above, as this Affidavit filing is a 105 pages long treasure dome of Craig Wright lies and forgeries. Allow us to show you two of them.
To start with, parts of a deed, (back)dated to April 22, 2011.
Appears legit, doesn’t it? But nah. In the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit we learned that Dave Kleiman’s signature was substantially different, making this deed document another forgery created by Craig Wright to support his false claims.
Secondly, Craig Wright also produced a “Statutory Declaration” dated October 11, 2013, signed by a solicitor called Stephen D’Emilio and co-signed by a witness solicitor called Adrian Fong, with his Affidavit, obviously prepared to support the ATO tax fraud (see email earlier) and the two false NSW Supreme Court claims. At closer inspection, we notice several anomalies.
You showed them a HTC phone, Craig?
Anyway. Firstly, the “1Feex” address mentioned in the list never belonged to Craig Wright. The “1Feex” address is where someone who hacked Mt Gox on March 1, 2011 parked some 80,000 stolen BTC.
Irony has it that Craig Wright, still not backing down on his Satoshi cosplay, is currently chasing 16 developers in court to get access to the Bitcoin on this same address, in a case, unsurprisingly, loaded again with lies and forgeries. Craig Wright is represented in this case by an UK law firm called ONTIER who, incompetently or being complicit in Craig’s fraud, totally missed (or willingly ignored) this, and many other, forgeries.
Needless to say that either way, this chasing of the holdings on the “1Feex” address will, of course, fail miserably again in the legal long run for all parties involved.
Another address on the list in the “Statutory Declaration”, the one starting with “16cou”, has been signed by the true owner in 2019, firmly and not incorrectly declaring “Craig is a liar and a fraud”. If this isn’t proof enough already that the whole NSW Supreme Court claims case is a farce and a fraud, we don’t know what is. There are several more forgeries supporting the Affidavit, but let’s leave it at this.
November 6, 2013: Craig is, seemingly against all odds, awarded the ~$57 million that he claimed in July/August 2013 by the New South Wales Supreme Court.
Except that, as the court ruling states: “the court notes the agreement of the parties that the plaintiff will accept the transfer of Intellectual Property held by the plaintiff in full and final satisfaction of the judgement”.
And this is what it was all about for Craig Wright. To lay his hands on non-existing Intellectual Property, and give it a court approved valuation. As Satoshi Itches explains:
“The point is that he now has “evidence” provided by the court that he owns over $50M worth of IP. He can now sell that “IP” to his various Australian companies, and claim tax and R&D concessions based on this.” — Satoshi Itches (who provides an even more detailed breakdown of Craig’s $57 million court fraud)
But unsurprisingly, given the lack of Supreme Court’s truthfinding process and therefore ‘missing’ the numerous lies and forgeries that Craig Wright dumped in the $57 million duo-claim, ATO (some critical notes from them in the screenshot above) would in later years consider this fraudulently obtained ruling as a “nullity based on sham”. We will come back to that in more detail in Part 2.
Note that these 2 cases cannot be found anymore on the Australian New South Wales Caselaw website. It appears that they have been deleted from the court’s systems as they were based on fraudulent information provided by plaintiff Craig Wright.
November 23, 2013: Craig (after divorcing Lynn Black in 2012) marries Ramona Watts.
November 25, 2013: Craig sells 23.4 BTC on Mt Gox.
November 28, 2013: Craig buys 17.2 BTC on Mt Gox.
December 2013: The falsely obtained W&K IP gets divided inside Craig’s Potemkin Village.
To give an idea about the many, many millions of dollars that Craig Wright created from thin air, first coming in with the false NSW Supreme Court claims, then going out again in the Hotwire group of companies, here a page from the “Certificate For Advance Finding” from AusIndustry from the early days (signed November 6, 2014 by David Wilson — General Manager R&D Tax Incentive). And remember, this is *only* a peek inside one of Craig’s companies, namely Coin-Exch Pty Ltd where Craig claims to have made over $50 million in costs!
Note that Craig backdated the whole R&D claim to the Australian fiscal year 2012/2013, running from July 2012 to June 2013. At the same time we know that almost 50% of the Hotwire group’s companies (like Integyrz Pty Ltd and Interconnected Research Pty Ltd) had only been incorporated in the next fiscal year: 2013/2014. Knowing this, it will come as no surprise for anyone we are sure, in Part 2 we will learn that Craig will start backdating numerous, and that is an understatement in this case, digital documents like emails, deeds, contracts, bookkeeping entries like sales and purchase invoices, and a lot more.
December 6, 2013: And another supercomputer enters the scene!
Meet C01N, the second supercomputer that Craig Wright claims to have had in the early years. He actually claimed C01N was already in use in September 2012!
It appears ATO was not very impressed with this machine. Nor with Craig’s performance in handling the audit. From one of the ATO reports:
December 24, 2013: Craig files a lawsuit against Mark Ferrier/MJF Mining.
Unfortunately the sources for this case, and the 2 W&K claims just concluded in November 2013, on Australian’s New South Wales Caselaw website are not available anymore. But it’s not a stretch, we presume, to conclude that with the recent success of obtaining two rulings for almost $57 million against W&K Info Defense Research LLC, Craig felt confident enough to try the same type of trick one more time. Now against Mark Ferrier, about which he had read in September earlier. Better prepared now, with aforementioned experience with W&K in the pocket, the ruling for almost $60 million followed quickly in February 2014.
January 3, 2014: Craig expands his Bitcoin fraud empire to the UK.
As Craig buys 2 UK shelf companies from CFS International Formations Ltd:
- Design By Human Ltd (incorporated October 10, 2012)
- Permanent Success Ltd (incorporated October 18, 2012)
And from here, Craig sets up an, at times hilariously incompetent, trail of backdated forgeries and filings at Companies House UK, to change the history of these previously empty companies, with appointments for, there he is again, (deceased) Dave Kleiman and Uyen Nguyen.
January 7, 2014: Craig renames the 2 UK companies.
Faketoshi Fun Fact: It appears the same agent, on the same day, also changed the name of another company, Achieve and Succeed Ltd to Denariuz Ltd and then back again.
And according other Companies House filings on this date, Craig Wright appoints himself Director for both renamed companies per January 3, 2014 too.
January 8, 2014: Craig sends email as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’
The following email was part of the Wired/Gizmodo dox package, and is one of the earliest known examples where Craig ‘(possibly…)’ is starting his Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay. Note that the amount “we control” is upped further to $700 million.
A peculiar detail about this email is the email address: satoshi@vistomail.com. This is an actual email address that Satoshi Nakamoto used when he was around in 2008–2011. So how would Craig Wright have obtained that email address? Could it be that he is Satoshi Nakamoto after all?
No, of course not.
Because, as we know from another email, dated 2015, from the very same email address, of which the header metadata has been inquired:
Knowing how to spoof a Satoshi email, combined with Craig’s knowledge of “metadata” (scroll back for his July 21, 2012 blog post) and his preference for creating fake emails by the truckloads to support his false Satoshi claims, it is more likely than not that this is one of his many forgeries again. To be fair, we can only be sure after a more indepth forensic inquiry, of course.
January 22, 2014: Craig withdraws 3 BTC from Mt Gox.
This would be Craig’s last transaction on Mt Gox, before its collapse. A full overview of Craig’s trading and transacting between April 2013 and January 2014:
February 4, 2014: Craig receives successful judgment in MJF Mining lawsuit.
The lawsuit filed against MJF Mining on December 24, 2013 comes to conclusion. Craig is awarded a judgment/order for almost $60 million.
Let’s recap. By now Craig managed to create from thin air:
- $28,254,666.00 (W&K claim 1)
- $28,534,049.79 (W&K claim 2)
- $59,141,505.00 (MJF Mining)
For a total of $115,930,220.79 in fraudulent claims.
Note again that, just like the 2 W&K Info Defense Research LLC cases from July 2013 — November 2013, this case also cannot be found anymore on the Australian New South Wales Caselaw website. It appears that this case also has been deleted from the court’s systems as it was, also, based on fraudulent information provided by plaintiff Craig Wright.
February 7, 2014: Mt Gox halts all trading.
February 10, 2014: Hotwire starts tweeting.
This is the first of only four tweets that Hotwire ever produced. We notice roaring marketing buzz about “Worlds First Bitcoin Bank", but knowing it’s a paper-only scheme to defraud ATO for millions… A sick tweet.
Now let’s have a look at the Hotwire website, on Wayback Machine as Craig Wright deleted all online presence from this era. We notice several of the companies (but not the full ten that he announced on his blog in September 2013 though) that had recently been incorporated by Craig, and at closer look: Craig summarizes his experience up to 2014, almost exclusively in the fields of Information Technology and Cybersecurity, Research and Forensics. There is notably no link or overlap whatsoever with the cypherpunk era designing, coding and launching of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto. But that’s not a surprise, of course.
February 11, 2014: First email to Kleiman estate.
This is the moment, the first written statement where Craig Wright explicitly and unambiguously attempts to connect himself, together with Dave Kleiman, to the pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto.
“Your son Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin"
What is remarkable about this moment, it appears as if Craig Wright is only testing the waters for this false claim, in the closed environment of a private conversation that he controls, with a small group of uninformed and gullible listeners. Craig has not, and will not anytime soon, make such claim, or anything close to it, to the ATO, for example.
Having been relying on merely conjuring up ownership of vast Bitcoin wealth for his tax fraud schemes, he now, some 10 months after the death of his friend Dave Kleiman, contacts the family to advise them that they probably shouldn’t delete anything on Dave’s hard drives because he’s going to tell them of a fortune in Bitcoin they made and shared. This, again, some 10 months after Dave had died.
Absurdly, in later years, Craig’s legal strategy against the Kleiman estate would see him attempt to bring suit against Ira Kleiman for ‘failing to protect the interests’ of his fictitious ‘Tulip Trust’, due to the fact in the 10 months Craig took to contact them following Dave’s death, the hard drives had, indeed, been formatted. If only he’d thought to say something sooner, right?
From here, for many months more, even more than a year we will learn, Craig will keep his alleged involvement with Bitcoin to the level of “mining Bitcoin since 2009". Is he afraid that the false Satoshi Nakamoto claim will be called out in no time by a more informed, more experienced audience, well connected in the Bitcoin community?
He should be afraid. And he will be called out numerous times too.
Because Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. He’s a cosplayer, falsely and fraudulently pretending to be someone he isn’t, for his own financial benefits, about which we will learn a lot more in Part 2, when his cosplaying further develops.
Outtro
We have arrived at the end of Part 1. We have covered the root era November 2003 — February 2014 of the brazen con man Craig Wright, charting a detailed timeline of events showing his early tax rebate frauds being scaled up through his plan to claim ownership of Bitcoin he never had, to the point where he has decided to commit to the final step of actually declaring himself to be responsible for the creation of Bitcoin, to be Satoshi, himself, and lay claim to the fabled ‘Satoshi Stash’.
Now please come back for Part 2, where we will cover February 2014 — December 2014, an era with even more lies, more forgeries, and more Faketoshi drama.
Thanks for reading.
To be continued... In Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2
