Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2
Written by Arthur van Pelt, with assistance from CryptoDevil
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material might become available after publication of this article, it will have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, to become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
We hope you truly enjoyed “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”. Let’s recap Part 1 for a bit before we continue with Part 2.
2003–2006
Craig Wright abandons his own consulting company when a new shareholder he’d persuaded to invest in it discovers that the financials don’t add up. Then sets about poaching his old clients from under the new investor and winds up in court on breach of contract.
Court orders him to stop approaching clients — ignored, Court finds him guilty of contempt, the judges sentence him to 28 days imprisonment, suspended on condition that he performs 250 hours of community services, and Craig is ordered to pay the costs of the proceedings.
Thus begins a decade-long pursuit of Craig by the lawyers for his old company for recovery of hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt he owes.
2009
Craig incorporates two business entities and sets about filing specious claims for tax rebates on ten-years worth of ‘Intellectual Property’ derived from his university studies which he insists were purchased for millions by these two companies, directly from him.
2010
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) find Craig Wright’s claims suspect and conduct an audit and interviews, looking deeper into his tax returns and business activities — none of these returns or business activities, records and transcripts from the time show, cite Bitcoin in any capacity whatsoever.
2011
Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman attempt to land four US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contracts and set up a US business entity (W&K Info Defense Research LLC) in order to handle the application process through — all four are rejected outright by DHS. The US company that Dave had incorporated has no further purpose and is left to be automatically struck off the active register by administrative dissolution.
2012
Having recently learned of the existence of Bitcoin, Craig floats the idea of setting up some sort of Bitcoin bank. Long on ambition, but short on viability, it doesn’t progress anywhere as an actual project.
2013
In April of this year, Dave Kleiman dies and Craig almost immediately seizes on the opportunity to re-write the nature of their past dealings, by filing two massive claims in NSW Supreme Court of almost $30 million each against their, dormant and defunct, US company ‘W&K Info Defense Research LLC’ which they’d solely used to file their rejected applications for US DHS contracts. The court relies on Craig’s own declaration and valuation of the company’s supposed assets and debts owed to him and, as the legal action is uncontested (as Craig was basically suing himself, with backdated ‘help’ of at that point in time ex-CFO Jamie Wilson), it rules in his favour, whereupon he promptly adds the ‘value’ to his rebate scam.
To load up the value of his intra-business transactions even more, he introduces the notion that purchases across his companies are being made through Bitcoin instead of bank deposits and transfers. For this he apparently finds public addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain and starts declaring to the tax authorities that he has been mining and buying Bitcoin since 2009 and that he owns and controls the multiple Bitcoin addresses he’d submitted in his bookkeeping records to the ATO. A notable moment arrives by the end of 2013 when the ATO’s Refund Integrity department launches their next audit of Craig’s tax rebate claims which, unlike previously, now contain supposed Bitcoin-related transactions.
February 2014
The ATO is becoming more and more sceptical of these multi-million-dollar transactions he is claiming took place for which he has filed for massive amounts in GST and R&D rebates. Their audit of Craig finds that 94% of his income or that of his business entities over the prior two years is derived from these tax rebates. ATO wants proof the Bitcoin transactions took place but he, instead, insists that no Bitcoin was actually ‘paid’ in a regular on-chain transaction, that these business dealings were conducted by drawing up a document of a ‘transfer of value’ where the purchaser of the product or service could ‘call on’ the value of the Bitcoin held in trust.
The one regular Bitcoin payment Craig claims to have made the previous year is to a fugitive conman, Mark Ferrier, for banking software, gold and industrial mining automation software. A conman Craig can provide no evidence of ever having met, spoken to or transacted with. The ATO clearly suspect Craig is lying about the Bitcoin addresses he professes to own. He needs to come up with something to convince them that he could be somebody who would, indeed, own a lot of Bitcoin. 10 months after Dave Kleiman’s death, Craig emails Dave’s family and claims:
“Your son Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin”
…and so we continue.
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.
2014, The year of the ATO hearings
February 12, 2014: Hotwire article in Business Insider Australia.
Remember, at this point Craig has only tested out his “I am Satoshi” claim or, rather, his “We were Satoshi” claim, in his email to the Kleiman family so far. He has an impending interview with a sceptical ATO due in the coming days and he is desperate to make them believe he has substantial connections to Bitcoin, namely, his supposed ‘Bitcoin Bank’ project.
He contacts Liz Tay, a reporter for ‘Business Insider Australia’ and goes into overdrive, wildly claiming that Hotwire PE was merely months away from opening ‘Denariuz Bank’, which would be the world’s first Bitcoin-based bank, slated to offer Bitcoin-based equivalents of conventional savings accounts, term deposits, credit and debit cards, and loans. Which, if true, was certainly newsworthy.
She writes that, “CEO Craig Steven Wright” had stated that the Denariuz Bank had been in talks with regulators in the UK, US, Australia and Singapore over the previous year and was due to begin taking deposits during the second half of 2014 and that he “expected a stock market listing to be in the pipeline but declined to discuss details”.
Liz also wrote that Wright had said Denariuz would launch with a global pool of more than 100,000 Bitcoin ($73.6 million at the time) from its backers.
At this point in time Hotwire PE was, in fact, on the brink of bankruptcy.
February 14, 2014: ATO interim audit report, withdrawn 5 days later
February 18, 2014: ATO hearing #1, interview with Craig Wright.
The transcript of this interview was part of the (self-)dox material that Wired and Gizmodo received in November 2015.
The interview blends a mix of claims being made at this time, some of which were true and others which have been entirely fabricated years later by Craig Wright to his tax lawyer Andrew Sommer, being repeated as though they are facts. This is a process which Craig will likely have been hoping would act as some kind of third-party validation of his ever-evolving narrative to the story he has been weaving for the ATO during their investigations into his increasingly audacious rebate filings.
Opening paragraph sets the scene, the ATO have closed the taps on the revenue stream Craig has been milking with millions of dollars of claimed business transaction tax rebates. The objective, Andrew Sommer asserts, is to simply try and “free up the cash flow” — the aforementioned tax rebate cash flow back into Craig’s company bank accounts.
He begins by leading with a chronological walk-through of “how we got to here”, launching straight in with a wholly unproven-to-this-day claim that in 2009 “the mining of Bitcoin commences” implied basis for Craig possibly holding hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of Bitcoins as an explanation for some of the underlying ‘value’ he has been ascribing to these questionable inter-company transactions his tax rebate amounts have been based on.
While this leading sentence in the chronology lacks any evidence whatsoever, other than, for sure ‘the mining of Bitcoin commences’ in 2009 by other people — some of whom will eventually go on to cryptographically prove Craig’s claimed ownership of their early wallet addresses as fraud and lies, the follow-on sentence is true, namely, “There’s audit and ensuing disputes with the Tax Office regarding information defence (the original Australian company he ‘sold’ his academic IP to)… and Dr Wright personally back in 2009” which did drag on for a couple of years, but is absolutely unrelated to anything Bitcoin-related as has been proven in the actual evidence from the time.
This process of blending supposed Bitcoin-connected history with actual business and tax-related activity Craig was verifiably connected to is repeated all through this transcript, but there is, and remains, a complete and utter lack of evidence to support any of the Bitcoin-related assertions.
Pick a sentence from the above ATO interview extract and it will be either:
- A true statement describing an event which did take place, but is nothing to do with Bitcoin;
- A never-proven statement trying to connect Craig to large-scale Bitcoin involvement;
- A statement which has since been debunked by the ATO and in courts of law, involving backdated contracts, correspondence and forgeries, which attempt to connect Craig to large-scale Bitcoin involvement.
Andrew Sommer, as you can see in the above transcript, is driven to make a great many assertions of supposed fact during this interview process but will, following receipt of evidence exposing his client’s fraud and lies, later in 2015 terminate his law firm’s relationship with Craig and his companies, citing serious issues with the integrity of documents received to both their office and the ATO, from Craig Wright, himself.
In the meantime, however, Craig is getting his very own version of reality laid out to suit his particular needs for his ongoing spat with the ATO, except, as we said, it is all a façade of lies and half-truths.
For example:
- There has never been any evidence of Craig being involved with Bitcoin mining at any time, let alone as an early miner.
- The supposed ‘Trusts’ were found to be nothing but back-dated ‘off-the-shelf’ companies or even just entirely fabricated and non-existent in any capacity.
- There was no ‘defence research’ R&D being conducted by Craig and Dave’s US company — records show only that it was created for the purpose of filing applications for US government contracts and, when these were rejected, simply left to become inactive on the register.
- The ‘MJF’ transaction which, as stated by Mr Sommer, was “germane to the returns that are being looked at currently” is later debunked as a convoluted lie involving pirated banking software and Craig setting up fake support-desk domains and correspondence in his desperate attempt to convince the ATO otherwise.
- The ‘July discussions’ with the ATO about the nature of Bitcoin were not, as Craig likes to pretend, the core reason for these disputes at all, the topic formed only a small and rather irrelevant part of their investigations into his ongoing rebate fraud and the ATO, as he will later find, were not quite so easy to fool as Craig would have hoped.
What is interesting to note in the above, however, is Andrew’s reference to the NSW Supreme Court case, which supposedly involved massive loans denominated in Bitcoin, developed Software and SDKs and supposed valuable IP Craig had sought to ‘recover’ from W&K Info Defense Research, where he states that, “Those orders in the New South Wales Supreme Court substantiated value of the claims being made for that intellectual property[…]roughly 28 million a piece” — this is exactly what Craig would have wanted to achieve in the sham litigation he had conducted in late 2013 where he got to self-declare the value of everything he was supposedly recovering from the US company, uncontested and with no third-party verification whatsoever. His very own tax lawyer then citing the Supreme Court decision to grant his ‘recovery’ action as being sufficient substantiation of the value when he faced the ATO’s questions on Craig’s behalf.
Perjury is a serious enough offence at the High Court level, the Supreme Court will not take kindly to being used as a conduit for tax fraud.
Later in the interview Craig, employing a colloquialism Satoshi once used, appears to be tentatively looking to see if anyone in attendance might be a suitable candidate for prompting the one question he wants to be asked, one which would absolutely serve to help in his efforts to persuade the ATO to accept why he might genuinely own a vast trove of Bitcoin:
“I did my best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running Bitcoin since 2009 but I think it’s getting — most — most — by the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know.”
But no-one bites. The only response it elicits is a, “Yeah, well.” from Andrew.
Bloody heathens, don’t they know anything about Satoshi? 🙂
After his prompting fails to hit the target, he simply adds another one of his since-debunked lies, the myth that he paid for fibre-optic internet cabling to be laid to the remote area of Bagnoo.
This is where our fictional narrator would interject with a wry, “Bagnoo to this day, does not and has never had, fibre-optic internet cabling”. Because of course.
The final observation on this extract to note is where Andrew Sommer describes a complicated arrangement of Bitcoin ‘payments through Africa’ at the direction of the Banking software agent Al Baraka, who supposedly then paid Mark Ferrier his fee as sales agent, as part of the ‘MJF’ transaction previously mentioned as being “germane to the returns being looked at currently”. The reason this is so convoluted is because Craig is really struggling to explain how he is meant to have paid millions of dollars for commercial banking software without there being so much as a single transaction verifiable through the bank or the blockchain.
But we, or rather the ATO, will get to that later in the investigation process.
February 26, 2014: ATO hearing #2, a meeting which Craig did not attend.
On this date, John Chesher (Craig’s accountant) and Ann Wrightson (Craig’s bookkeeper) met with ATO officials at their office building in Parramatta, Sydney. As the minutes state, the “Meeting was for John Chesher to explain workings in the revised activity statements sent to the ATO on 25 February 2014”. In the minutes of this meeting (note: this document was also part of the dox-package that Wired and Gizmodo received), we see again a situation where Craig, not yet willing to explicitly declare himself to be Satoshi to those who, unlike the Kleiman family, might be motivated to ask for proof, has a representative simply repeat the previously-asserted ‘OG miner’ fabrication to the ATO.
“Craig Wright started all this in 2009 when he started mining Bitcoins.”
In the following quotes, JC is John Chesher, speaking on behalf of Craig Wright.
Applying the previously-defined 3-step rule to understanding the actual truth of the assertions made to the ATO investigators in these interviews, it is again clear that nothing of substance is ever proven regarding Craig’s claims of owning ANY of the millions-of-dollars-worth of Bitcoin he desperately needs to convince were backing the transactions he’d claimed fiat rebates for.
- “Craig Wright took the Bitcoins that he had mined offshore.”
- “W&K was an entity created for the purpose of mining Bitcoins.”
- “Craig then took the Bitcoins and put them into a Seychelles Trust. A bit of it was also put into Singapore.”
- “Craig had mined a lot of Bitcoins. […] Craig had gotten approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins.”
- “Mr Kleiman would have had a similar amount.”
- “Mr Kleiman and Craig Wright decided to start up W&K because they both wanted to get involved with Bitcoins.”
- “W&K was responsible for providing funding.”
Craig’s ENTIRE scheme regarding the many multi-million-dollar transactions he fraudulently claimed record amounts of rebate for, is premised almost exclusively on Bitcoin ‘value assignments’ and ‘rights to call on’ Bitcoin supposedly held in trusts he has simply dreamed up a back-dated history for. But there is one deal, as we highlighted already, that the ATO want more clarity on during this interview… the Mark Ferrier, or ‘MJF’ deal:
So they have asked for it to be explicitly confirmed that an actual on-chain, regular transaction, Bitcoin payment was made for this business transaction. Unlike the extraordinarily specious ‘assignment of value’ non-moving-Bitcoin Craig is clinging to for the other deals between the companies he owns, this one could only have been transacted with an actual payment of some kind… if it were an actual commercial transaction and not wholly fabricated by Craig and supported only through forged email correspondence and fake domains he’d registered himself, of course. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…
February 28, 2014: Mt Gox files for bankruptcy, Craig loses 14.63 BTC in the process. As confirmed on March 15, 2019 by the Mt Gox bankruptcy trustee, Mr Nobuaki Kobayashi.
The price of Bitcoin was around $550.00 at this day, so Craig lost roughly $8,050 (USD that is). Now please try to remember this number until end of April 2014: $8,050.
March 1, 2014: Craig and Ira Kleiman discuss ‘GICSR Trust in Belize’.
Buckle up, here we go, as this is quite the story. Remember October 10, 2013, the DATACON conference in Sydney where Craig pretended to be Vice President of GICSR?
Well, he never was Vice President of GICSR. In fact, he wasn’t connected to GICSR at all anymore.
At the time, the following people were in charge at GICSR. And indeed, no Craig Wright to see here in any capacity.
Pictured above is the Board of Global Institute for Cybersecurity + Research (GICSR) at this point in time. We are talking 2011–2013 here. On the photo, from left to right: Gene Fredricksen, executive director, North America; Deborah Kobza, executive director/CEO; and Richard Zaluski, executive director, international programs and services.
So what happened? Craig Wright knew Richard Zaluski, who introduced Craig to the GICSR in 2011. They had asked Craig to join as an unpaid volunteer to help promote this non-profit organization incorporated by Deborah Kobza in June 2011. As it happened, Deborah Kobza was depo-ed on December 18, 2019 in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.
But before we go there, first this. Allow us to show you a little email thread, that starts at the bottom with a backdated Craig Wright “just some emails from Dave” forgery. It’s a pity the court docket doesn’t provide the full PGP key of that email, otherwise we could have given that forgery an exact creation date. But since Craig send the email to himself and puts no effort in hiding that fact, and then sends the doctored email onward to Ira Kleiman, it strongly appears as if Craig created the forgery on the fly on February 28, 2014.
Then, one email up in the thread, “GICSR Trust in Belize” is mentioned…
To add, in one of Craig’s depositions in Kleiman v Wright (the one on March 18, 2020), we learn that Craig dropped the “GICSR Trust in Belize” also to Dave Kleiman’s friend and business partner Patrick Paige a few days earlier in February 2014:
“Q: Dr. Wright, I am going to share with you what you produced in this litigation DEFAUS 112977. Do you recognise this as a printout of e-mails between you and Patrick Paige?
A: I recognise this but I did not — this was produced by my lawyers from an Australian company capture so, no, I didn’t produce it.
Q: Do you see here, on the bottom of the Bates label 11297 — the top of 112978 the e-mail from Patrick Paige to Craig Wright on Monday 17th February 2014 at 1.01 a m.?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you see Patrick asked you: “What about accounts and location DK had” etc, “DK” being Dave Kleiman. “I thought you were going to put a list together”. Do you see that?
A: Yes. I did not realise how little knowledge Patrick Paige had of Bitcoin. Unfortunately, I over-assume the amount of knowledge people have. There are not accounts in Bitcoin, but I did not realise — I keep thinking that people understand my invention. They don’t.
Q: Is this a real e-mail you received from Patrick Paige, Dr. Wright?
A: That looks correct, yes.
Q: Then on February 16, 2014 at 3.41 p.m. you responded; do you see that? A: I did.
Q: Was that actually your response? Did you send that?
A: Yes, I sent such a response.
Q: You said: “I do not have a lot to give you. These may help: W&K Info Defense LLC and then GICSR Trust”. Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: Was Dave a beneficiary of the GICSR Trust?
A: No, Dave was not involved with GICSR at all. GICSR is an organisation set up to instruct and fund law enforcement globally. If you look at the original website etc, what was involved was a combination of NASA, Department of Homeland Security and the NSA. Basically, my role in the Asia Pacific area was to teach and instruct governments and law enforcement, which I did. I had tried to teach them forensics and the interception of illegal money laundering activities. The GICSR Trust noted there was because at one stage I had sent Bitcoin to Dave. It is not that he was a beneficiary. I have funded Dave in the past, I paid him money to do certain jobs if he had any records that he had kept, which I discovered later that he did not, then he would have been able to link that to the payments he was receiving from me to do work.
Q: Dr. Wright do you see above that at the top of the page is an e-mail from Craig Wright to Patrick Paige at 12:33:11 p.m.?
A: Yes, I do.
Q: Is that an actual e-mail you sent to Patrick Paige?
A: That looks correct, yes.
Q: Dr. Wright you resigned from GICSR — strike that. Dr. Wright you tendered your resignation to GICSR in February 2012, is that correct?
A: I don’t remember when I did. The organisation was moved over to a new organisation. The same people kept going so, basically, I kept funding the same activities that I was doing in the new organisation.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright
And here we note another discrepancy; Craig Wright wasn’t even connected to GICSR in any capacity in October 2013, as he had indeed resigned from his position (as said, as a VOLUNTEER, we will learn in a bit) in February 2012!
So what else did Craig remember about the email to Ira Kleiman, in which he mentioned “GICSR Trust in Belize”? Let’s go to another deposition of Craig, this one took place on April 4, 2019.
“Q: Dr. Wright, I am handing you what has been marked now as Plaintiff’s Exhibit 8. This is some exchange of e-mails between you and Ira Kleiman; do you recognise that?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you go to 3 of 5 of the document?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you see there at the bottom it says: “1.) GICSR Trust in Belize”?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you explain to me what the GICSR trust in Belize is?
A: It was a trust set up in Belize.
Q: By whom?
A: I do not know.
Q: Why did you give this information to Ira? Why was this information relevant to Ira?
A: There was a person I thought would be interested in Dave’s past, which was his father, who then put me onto Ira, who was a greedy person who wished not to have shares that would vest over a long time but instructed me to hide assets because he would have to pay tax. So, I stopped talking to Ira because basically I had this fraud, con man, trying to take money that he was not owed and trying to hide things from the tax office in America and lying and cheating and whatever else to make up things to try and get more.
Q: Dr. Wright, I do not understand how that is related to my question, so let us try — —
A: It is related perfectly well.
Q: Let us try one more time. Did Dave Kleiman have anything to do with the GICSR trust in Belize?
A: Yes.
Q: What was his relationship to the GICSR trust in Belize?
A: We organised putting information onto computers because of it.
Q: I am sorry, what type of information?
A: This is, again, something we will need to talk about with the judge.
Q: Okay, Dr. Wright, are there reasons — —
A: What I will say is there a reason if you look at the GICSR website that used to be up in the past, it had Department of Homeland Security, NSA and other things on the website.
Q: Do you know Deborah Kobza from GICSR?
A: Not personally.
Q: Can you look at page 2 of 5, please.
A: Yes.
Q: Can you look at the message that comes from Ira to you at March 2nd, 2014. Can you read that for the record?
A: “From: ‘ — — ‘“.
Q: Dr. Wright, please just read the body of the e-mail.
A: “Just to clarify on thoughts from previous e-mail… In one of the e-mail exchanges between Dave and you, he mentioned that you had 1 million Bitcoins in the trust and since you said he has 300,000 as his part I was figuring the other 700,000 is yours. Is that correct? Ira.”
Q: Can you read above that your response at March 1st, 2014 at 3 p.m.?
A: Mine. “Around that. Minus what was needed for the company’s use.””
“Q: Can you go down to the February 28th, 2014 e-mail.
A: Mmm-hmm.
Q: You say: “The trust Dave setup should have around 300,000.” Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: Is that 300,000 Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: Where is the trust Dave set up?
A: Dave set up a series of trusts as well. One was in Belize, which was not GICSR, he also had one in Panama and companies in Costa Rica.
Q: Do you have any information on who helped him set those up?
A: No.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright
It strongly appears as if Craig Wright was, in this timeframe, more and more playing around with the idea to put ‘his’ Bitcoin in ‘offshore trusts’, as that would give the opportunity to not sign any addresses in front of the ATO, and at the same time it would open up the possibility to assign rights to these Bitcoin (instead of physically moving them around for payment purposes) and last but not least, it would also avoid having to pay taxes on these Bitcoin-that-he-never-owned in Australia.
Now let’s go to the deposition of Deborah Kobza, to learn the full scope of Craig’s multi million fraud with the GICSR organization, almost two years after he had stopped being an unpaid volunteer for them. A few quotes:
“Q: — people — the people that worked with GICSR, were they outside the United States?
A: People that volunteered to help do work were outside of the United States, yes.
Q: And Dr. Wright was one of them?
A: He was one person that was a volunteer to help. I mean, he was never paid a salary or anything like that. He was a volunteer.
Q: Were any of those volunteers authorized to create or establish trusts on behalf of GICSR?
A: Absolutely not. No.”
“Q: So as part of your work with GICSR, did you ever create any trusts?
A: No.
Q: You — did you ever create any sort of vehicle for the purpose of holding assets offshore?
A: Oh, my gosh, no.
Q: Did you ever collaborate with Mr. Wright to create or establish any kind of vehicle for assets?
A: No.”
“Q: So what I want to direct your attention to —
A: Uh-huh.
Q: — is towards the top of the page —
A: Uh-huh.
Q: — where Craig Wright wrote GICSR trust.
A: Uh-huh.
Q: Do you know what that might refer to?
A: No. Others than — wait a minute. Other than what has been told to me by your office.
Q: Do you recognize the numbers below that, 274997114?
A: No, not — not off — not offhand. I don’t know that that was GICSR’s EIN number or not, but I don’t — I’d have to look it up.
Q: So but sitting here today, those numbers have no significance to you?
A: No, I’d have to kind of validate what that is.
Q: And what about below that where it says TTA-1–14?
A: I have no idea what that is.
Q: And below that, it mentions Belize?
A: Uh-huh.
Q: Does Belize have any special meaning to you in this context? So did GICSR ever have any business dealings connected to Belize?
A: Never.
Q: Have you ever been to Belize?
A: No.
Q: Do you know anybody who’s been to Belize?
A: I don’t think so, no.
Q: No? Now, did GICSR ever enter into any intellectual property agreements? A: No.
Q: Have you ever heard of a company Cloudcroft Pty Limited?
A: No.
Q: Have you ever entered into any kind of agreement with Mr. Wright?
A: No, other than him, you know, working on that — I don’t know if we call it an agreement, but, you know, trying to help bring people in for that best practice research project. That was it.
Q: So I’m going to hand you what we’re going to mark as Plaintiff Exhibit 5. So have you ever seen this document before?
A: No.
Q: I’m going to call your attention to below parties —
A: Uh-huh.
Q: — where it says Craig Wright R&D.
A: Uh-huh.
Q: Are you familiar with an entity by that — by that name?
A: Craig Wright R&D?
Q: Yes.
A: No. Can I ask a question about the line underneath it? I don’t know what CSCSS is.
Q: Okay.
A: Okay. So — okay. Sorry.
Q: So — you’re okay. So I’m going to ask you to turn to page 2.
A: Okay.
Q: And do you see the date? It says August 22nd, 2013 at the top?
A: Uh-huh.
Q: And so this is about a year after Craig’s involvement with GICSR had ended?
A: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Q: Do you see where it says, “GICSR (acting through Craig Wright R&D)”?
A: Yeah, at the top underneath, “Between,” yeah.
Q: Are you aware of GICSR ever acting through Craig Wright?
A: Never.
Q: Or through an entity called Craig Wright R&D?
A: Never.
Q: Would Craig Wright have been — was Craig Wright ever authorized to enter into contracts on behalf of GICSR?
A: No.
Q: So I’m going to ask you to turn to page 7. So do you see at the bottom there’s a reference to a license fee?
A: Uh-huh.
Q: And I’m going to ask you to turn to page 11.
A: Uh-huh.
Q: And do you see there’s —
A: Wow.
Q: — a number?
A: Where it says, “License fee”?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q: What is that number?
A: It looks to be — God, $28,181,818.18.
Q: Would this have been a notable transaction for GICSR to engage in? Would this — let me —
A: Yeah, I mean —
Q: Strike that. So did GICSR ever engage in business transactions?
A: Can you define, like, business transactions? I mean, because we had people — we did consulting and had people sponsor workshops and things like that, but…
Q: Let me ask this: How many times did GICSR make a multimillion-dollar purchase?
A: Never.
Q: Do you see next to, “Product,” where it says, “ACSEO program IP and code”?
A: Uh-huh.
Q: Does that have any significance to you?
A: No. I mean, I know in the context of this, IP would mean intellectual property? Is that what that refers to?
Q: So —
A: I don’t know just from — no, I don’t know what that is.
Q: So are you aware of GICSR ever licensing such a product?
A: Never.
Q: From anybody?
A: No.
Q: Now, I’ll ask you to turn to the next page. Have you ever seen this page before?
A: No.
Q: And can you see who is identified on the signature lines?
A: Yeah, I see Craig Wright, director, and through GICSR, Deborah Kobza. I don’t know if it would have executive director, NH-ISAC there. That’s a completely different organization. So I don’t understand why that’s there.
Q: So is that your signature?
A: No, it’s not.
Q: Does it resemble your signature?
A: No, it doesn’t. I mean, when I — no. This definitely does not resemble my signature.
Q: I’m going to show you another exhibit which we’re going to mark as Plaintiff’s Exhibit 6.
MR. PASCHAL: I’m marking this portion of the deposition as confidential since we’re using confidential documents.
BY MR. DELICH: Q: So have you ever seen this document before?
A: No.
Q: So I’ll represent to you that it was — it’s a chart that was prepared by the Australian Tax Office.
A: Uh-huh. Q: And I’m going to ask you to turn to page 6 of it.
MR. PASCHAL: In this deposition, every time we have a document, can you not give a proffer of what you believe the document means to the witness? Can the witness just testify about the document? That’s improper. It’s improper coaching, absolutely.
MR. DELICH: So say that this is —
MR. PASCHAL: To represent what you think a document is to the witness is improper coaching. You can ask the witness does she know the document, has she seen the document.
MR. DELICH: So — and she has not.
MR. PASCHAL: Okay.
MR. DELICH: Are you disputing whether it was created by the Australian Tax Office?
MR. PASCHAL: I’m not disputing anything. I’m telling you in the deposition for every time you show a document for you to then give an explanation of what you believe that document means is improper because if she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know.
MR. DELICH: Okay.
MR. FREEDMAN: Bryan, make your objection and let Joe conduct the deposition. It’s his deposition, not yours. He can ask whatever he wants and he can say what he wants and you can make whatever objection you want.
Q: So I’m going to ask you to turn to page 6, row 12.
A: It’s small type. Okay.
Q: So there’s a sentence that says, “The software concerned was clearly identified as BAA 3.” Do you see that?
A: Yeah, about halfway down in that first paragraph.
Q: So do you know what BAA is?
A: No.
Q: So the next sentence — so do you see the next sentence where it says, “The sale was for $31 million and the invoice states, ‘Transfer based on GICSR US research NASA funding P2P system’”?
A: What?
Q: So do you see — do you see that sentence?
A: Yes.
Q: So does that have any significance to you?
A: None whatsoever.
Q: Do you know what a NASA funding P2P system refers to?
A: No. I’ve never done business with NASA before.
Q: And then can you see the next sentence after that?
A: The ASCSEO [sic] PDF, that sentence?
Q: Yeah.
A: Yeah.
Q: Do you mind reading that sentence?
A: The AS — ASCEO PDF provided indicates that the funding was from GICSR. Q: So is that true?
A: No.
Q: How do you know that that’s not true?
A: Because I’ve never — I mean, you’re saying that funding of $31 million was paid? Is that what it’s saying?
Q: So I’ll just refer you back to the document.
A: Okay. No. I know that it’s not true because, you know, I handled everything for GICSR. I mean, there’s —
Q: Can you define everything in a little bit more detail?
A: Well, I did the operations, I handled the bank account, you know, I paid out invoices, I’ve sent out invoices. I did all of that. There wasn’t another entity that did any of that.
Q: Was there anybody else at GICSR who had access to the bank accounts?
A: No.
Q: Did GICSR have a need for any software in connection with its best practices work? So, can you tell me a little bit more about what your work at GICSR entailed in terms of the best practices project? I believe that’s what you referred to it as, right?
A: Yeah, it was an effort to bring together representatives from industry and academia to kind of connect the dots to put together an IT security kind of framework, you know, best practices. When you’re developing systems and that type of thing or — or doing your policies and procedures, what types of best practices you need for IT security. So that was the — the effort to do that. I used — gosh, I think we used SharePoint for a little bit just to help with, you know, doing some research and putting best practices documents and things like that up, but there wasn’t any software we needed, I mean, other than, you know, like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, you know, to do presentations and things like that in.
Q: Was GICSR a for-profit enterprise?
A: No. No.
Q: What kind of —
A: Nonprofit.
Q: You’ve looked at a lot of documents today.
A: Uh-huh.
Q: What is your reaction to seeing some of these for the first time?
A: My mouth is a little dry. (Witness took a drink of water.) It’s a continuation of the shock that I received when I got the first phone call about this. Seeing written evidence of somebody that’s stolen your identity and is committing fraud and, you know, using your name and the name of the small nonprofit I had is — is shocking and appalling. I’m very, very upset. To the point of filing my own lawsuit for fraud and identity theft. I mean, it’s — it’s shocking that someone that was represented to me that worked for a university could move on to do things like this. You know, you see things about people getting impacted by crime and things like that and how they feel helpless, and that’s how I feel. It’s — it makes me sick to my stomach. I mean, I’m just being perfectly honest.
Q: I have nothing further.” — Joseph Delich, Deborah Kobza
Although the documents described are not provided in the public court docket of Kleiman v Wright, we get a good impression of what happened after Craig resigned from his voluntary job at GICSR in February 2012. Late 2013 and/or early 2014 Craig created several forgeries with GICSR as a named party in multi million business dealings, he gave himself falsely the position of Vice President and played around with a non-existing GICSR trust in Belize.
To sum up the nature of the above Craig falsehoods about his role with the GICSR organisation and the subsequent testimony he gave when questioned, which was utterly dismantled by the woman who actually incorporated and ran it, the tl;dr overview for anyone who might be somewhat exhausted with the litany of lies exposed by the facts is:
- Craig references a GICSR Trust in email with Ira (likely as a pretence of further later planned embellishment to explain why he can’t simply hand over a trove of Bitcoin to Dave’s estate).
- Craig is asked in court what the GICSR reference was all about, says it was related to ‘work’ he and Dave Kleiman did for them, super-secret-squirrel *taps nose* ‘high-level I-could-tell-you-but-then-I’d-have-to-kill-you’ type of stuff.
- Deborah Kobza, when asked about same in court, “what complete and utter bollocks!” (excuse the slight paraphrase for brevity)
The GICSR/Kobza fraud case also makes perfectly clear that Craig Wright is not afraid to roleplay other people, both dead (Dave Kleiman, David Rees) AND alive (Deborah Kobza), and execute substantial fraud with made up stories, plagiarisms and handmade forgeries for pretty large amounts, under their name. If you ask us, it’s beyond delusional to think that Craig would never do that with the Satoshi Nakamoto moniker.
We’ve tried reaching out to Mrs Kobza with a few questions, especially about if she followed up with that lawsuit, but at publication date we have not heard back yet. As Mrs Kobza is witness in the ongoing Kleiman v Wright lawsuit (and called for testimony at the Jury Trial in November 2021), it is not unlikely that she has been strongly advised by her counsel to not respond to outside requests during the course of the case.
March 2, 2014: The ‘Bond Villains’ email forgery.
This section is copied from my article “The Faketoshi Tale of 1Feex”.
On this day, Craig Wright creates an email forgery where Dave Kleiman apparently talks about a lot of Bitcoin addresses. Almost casually, paper wallets are also mentioned, for the 1Feex address and other Bitcoin addresses.
Craig then backdates the email forgery to October 31, 2012, and sends it to John Chesher of the ATO (with his wife Ramona Watts on the CC) on March 10, 2014. This email forgery is then only eight days old.
Next to 1Feex, we recognize several other remarkable addresses: 12ib7 (Pineapple Hack lawsuit), 12Hdd, 16Ls6, 1P3S1 and 12Hdd (4 addresses belonging to Mt Gox as we saw in Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1, after moving the holdings of these addresses and splitting them up in chunks of around 2,000 BTC now in cold storage under supervision of the bankruptcy trustee, waiting to be paid to the creditors someday).
How do we know this is a forgery created on March 2, 2014? We know this from a forensic report by Dr Edman, the forensic expert in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, acting on behalf of Ira Kleiman.
And it’s again an awkward date stamp in the PGP signature that reveals the sloppiness of another homemade Wright forgery, isn’t it Craig?
By the way, make no mistake about who is creating all the forgeries that pop up in Craig Wright’s fraudulent Bitcoin career since the second half of 2013. Although Craig wants you to believe he is continuously being hacked over the years, with ever-changing narratives about who these supposed hackers might be and what their — insert random conspiracy theory — motives are, the hard fact is; Craig Wright is the only person, on each and every forged occasion, with the means, the motives, the incentives, the skills and the opportunity to create all the forgeries.
Hence we find Magistrate Judge Reinhart ruling “Dr Wright willfully created the fraudulent documents.” during the discovery phase in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.
For those who just can’t get enough of how Craig’s forgeries are unraveled by forensic experts like Dr Edman in the Kleiman case, with examples of how Craig is sending emails TO HIMSELF to then alter them in the text and metadata to make it look like someone else, in many cases Dave Kleiman, send the email, should read this Affidavit of Dr Edman.
March 7, 2014: Craig uses Satoshi Nakamoto’s PGP key in blog forgery.
On this date we witness Craig Wright’s intention to start developing his Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay further. This time, however, he won’t quite say it explicitly, no, he starts leaving little breadcrumbs on the internet for Satoshi researchers to find. Unfortunately for Craig, the world wouldn’t notice his desperate attempts, and this to his growing frustration in 2015. More about that in Part 3 of this Early Years series.
Twitter user Joseph P Gardling explains:
“Just to be clear what happened here: Craig created a backdated “Satoshi” PGP key in 2014 and uploaded it to the MIT keyserver. He then searched for an old blog post around the time the whitepaper was released. He then copied the PGP info from the key server into that old post.
But he didn’t realize that the MIT keyserver lists the version of its software in that PGP output. Here, it’s 1.1.4, which was released in late 2012 and integrated into the MIT keyserver in late 2013. Craig got hoisted by his own petard yet again.
According to the WayBack Machine metadata, the archive was likely initiated by a user deliberately trying to archive the page, rather than just a normal crawl. So Craig edited the post then likely archived it *himself*, sealing his fraud forever in Internet history.” — Joseph P Gardling, Twitter thread
“The “Entropy” blog post snapshot was crawled through liveweb crawler, which is initiated by users https://archive.org/details/liveweb”” according Twitter user TechMiX.
So, to recap, on March 7, 2014 Craig went to edit an existing November 2008 blog post called “Entropy”, he added Satoshi’s public PGP key to it in a PGP signing procedure, and afterwards he uploaded the results on the WayBack Machine website to make it look like Satoshi Nakamoto himself genuinely signed that blog post in November 2008.
However, typical again for Craig’s sloppiness in creating forgeries, the SKS version 1.1.4 wasn’t available before October 2012.
March 10, 2014: The Professor Rees Fraud
Once again Craig chooses to cynically exploit a dead person for his own gain, that of trying to convince the ATO there were significant business transactions of size and scope behind the many tax rebate amounts he has filed for. What better way than to lead with a plethora of wild, contradictory and wholly unlikely claims about someone who no longer has a voice with which to dispute such.
Seeing as the ATOs steady evisceration of Craig’s web of lies and forgeries covers many, many topics, we’ll bring in their 2015 debunking of this particular one at this point in the fraud timeline, where they referenced, “10th March 2014 the taxpayer advised that Professor Rees was a contractor for the taxpayer”.
By 2015, as you will see below, having collectively shown themselves to be more than a match for Craig’s endless techno-babble and lies, they carefully and precisely slice through his many contradictions and fabrications in this section headed ‘Professor Rees’, as told by the ATO.
A concise version of the above 2015 dismantling of Craig by the ATO could best be phrased with the following, totally paraphrased summation.
Craig: I had Professor Rees do some work as a contractor and paid him by giving him the private key to seven Bitcoin addresses, here are those public addresses…
ATO: Some of those addresses are for Bitcoin you already claimed formed part of your ‘MJF’ transaction and one of them had no Bitcoin in it at all on the date the Professor Rees transaction is supposed to have taken place — can you please sign a message to prove you actually control those addresses?
Nguyen: No, because… something… something… homomorphic encryption scheme means that even though we totally had the private keys, pinkie-swear, we then, like, didn’t anymore.
ATO: Ok, so the family of Professor Rees say they’ve never heard of you Craig and that beyond 2008 he was mentally ‘frail’ and highly unlikely to have been working on anything.
Craig: He gave me maths stuff and wrote some software for me.
ATO: Craig, his daughter said her father did not ever write software and at the time of the supposed date of this transaction he was in the last weeks of his life.
Craig: Yeah, well, what would they know about what their elderly and suffering from senile dementia, dying father was up to back then?
Now please bear with us, the ATO is not done yet, as the report continues with its decision to reject everything Professor Rees related (look for the quote “The evidence provided by [Craig Wright] does not establish that [Craig Wright] acquired any material or services from, or owed any obligation to, Professor Rees.”):
So, in summary, the outcome of the ATO’s analysis of Craig’s claims about Professor Rees having done consultancy work for him was:
- None of the family had ever heard of Craig.
- They all stipulated that Professor Rees did not undertake consulting work.
- When Craig provided ‘evidence’ of this work to the ATO it turned out to simply be code lifted from the internet.
- When Craig promised to provide paperwork related to this work to the ATO, he then failed to do so.
- When Craig was asked to run the purported software in front of the ATO, he refused to do so.
After this utter destruction by the ATO of the Professor Rees story, Craig would not re-introduce Rees much more in his false claims in later years. In the public court docket of Kleiman v Wright, we can find several email conversations between Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman where they mention Professor David Rees, but these are all backdated forgeries, made by Craig with Bitmessage after Dave’s passing.
On Craig’s current blog, Professor Rees is never mentioned. There’s one rare interview with Finder though on April 27, 2019, where Craig opened up once more about Professor Rees. Here he would give a whole new twist to Rees his involvement in the Craig’s fantasy history of Bitcoin:
“David [Rees] wasn’t really involved with what was Bitcoin”
Quote taken from Finder, “Dr. Craig Wright explains the origins of Bitcoin — Full interview”
March 28, 2014: W&K Info Defense Research LLC reinstated by Uyen Nguyen.
While Craig was creating a whole new paper-only history around this company, both before 2011 and after 2011 (2011 being the year Dave Kleiman and Craig Wright failed to land four Homeland Security projects, the only real activities around this entity, ever), he forgot one thing. A dissolved company does not appear very active.
But when ATO reminded him, he was quick to act in a desperate attempt to, again, rewrite history.
Speaking of the interview they conducted with Craig on this day, this excerpt below showed Craig scrabbling around to come up with explanations for the myriad inconsistencies and contradictions he is stumbling over as he creates this oh-so-tangled web of deceit. The interview is held in the offices of his, for the time being, tax lawyer and they are furnishing the ATO with supposed documented evidence and information that they believe to be factual and truthful, because their client, Craig Wright, has no doubt assured them that it is.
It was not.
The very first sub-paragraph we see below marked ‘a.’ discusses supposed IP being transferred on 15 July 2013 by Craig to DeMorgan, IP which is claimed to have been developed under agreement with W&K Info Defense, is provably a lie because he is claiming that it was “core software and training materials” and “source code” purportedly “related to projects completed for the United States Department of Homeland Security”. That will be the US DHS project proposals that were roundly rejected, remember?
The only work ‘completed’ for the US DHS was the application forms they submitted. Oops.
But, just as problematic for Craig as his provable lie related to the fake IP which is meant to underpin the value of his multi-million-dollar tax rebates, if not more so given that it concerns fraudulent claims he made for his New South Wales Supreme Court (NSWSC) ‘recovery action’ against W&K he won by default, is what is outlined in sub-paragraph ‘d.’ above.
During this March 28, 2014 interview with Craig and his legal representatives, the matter of the supposed $20,000,000 bond, which formed part of Craig’s valuation of the debt W&K ‘owed’ him was discussed. Not only had he claimed tax relief on the value of these bonds which he, when later asked by the ATO, admitted that he had not actually funded, he went on to offer up the laughably hand-wavy claim that it might have been an “American gaming company called ‘Playboy Gaming’” who had, but that he couldn’t be certain. Ignoring the fraudulent tax relief Craig had filed for bonds he later admitted he did not fund, the fact is that the huge valuation of the supposed amount owed to him by W&K consisted of, among other things, these $20,000,000-worth of bonds.
Again, contrary to Craig’s to-this-day claims that his legal woes in Australia were merely the result of unfair persecution and misunderstanding about the taxation status of Bitcoins, we see again and again that he has executed a breathtaking array of fraud and remember, ‘winning’ a case in the NSW Supreme Court through such fraud and perjury is a serious criminal offence.
April 2, 2014: The MFJ transactions go from “on-block” to “off-block”
Around February/March 2014 Craig Wright probably realized that ATO is capable of using a block explorer, and the 245,103 BTC and 135,000 BTC transactions are not visible in the Bitcoin blockchain… So how to solve that? Cunning Craig goes “off-block”.
April 10, 2014: Craig appoints Uyen Nguyen in the two UK companies.
A “Consent to act” contract was made up, with the appearance of legitimacy (although it would have made more sense to put the 2012 appointments on top to create a historical order, if you ask us)…
But since we know that Craig bought these two companies on January 3, 2014 AND because the (only) filing that was made at Companies House as a result of the “Consent to act” contract is dated April 10, 2014…
We can objectively conclude: yet another backdating fraud by Craig Wright attempting to conjure up his own version of history.
But the fraud with the UK companies didn’t stop here, of course. Let’s read what ATO found out about these two empty shelf companies. Bear in mind that this company, C01N Ltd, is meant to be able to be relied upon by Craig as evidence to the ATO of there being substantial substance and value to the business transactions underpinning his multi-million-dollar tax rebates.
His Australian company, Panopticrypt is appointed as director from 1st January 2013, in a form filed 22nd February 2014, along with his filing company accounts on the same day dated as at 30th June 2013, showing as assets for C01N Ltd, debtors of over 38.5 million pounds.
Craig contends that C01N Ltd was set up by Dave Kleiman and that he had nothing to do with its administration, albeit any late and backdated filings are simply him trying to correct the sloppy compliance by Dave and/or the formation agent, CFS.
As the ATO, again, went to the trouble of speaking with the very people who could verify, or disprove, Craig’s claims, he is, once more, proven to be lying through his teeth about these backdated appointments and accounts being legitimate. Their report, below, includes these inconvenient facts provided by the UK company formation agent about “Design by Human Ltd”, namely, that it was:
- A Shelf Company which was purchased from them by Craig on 3rd January 2014.
- Had been dormant for the entire period they had held it since incorporating it.
- That they had eventually changed its name to ‘Moving Forward in Business’ to sell as a Shelf Company and that it was subsequently changed to C01N Ltd by Craig a few days after he bought it from them, in January 2014.
So, neither Uyen Nguyen, nor Dave Kleiman, could ever have been legitimately acting as Director for this company from 2012, as Craig tried to fake, because he hadn’t even purchased it from the UK formation agent until 14 months later, which was also some 9 month AFTER Dave Kleiman had died.
It also means that its back-dated company accounts, which detailed a supposed multi-million-pound asset to the business value mid-2013, in order to underpin his multi-million-dollar tax rebates in Australia, was also an absolutely, completely and utterly, criminally fraudulent filing.
April 25, 2014: Craig sends Ira Kleiman Chronology 2009– April 2014.
This purported chronology which Craig has sent to Ira Kleiman is just more of the same fabrication, misrepresentation and outright lies which serve only to lead the Kleiman family to believe that there could be untold millions in Bitcoin wealth and valuable trusts, shareholdings and IP that Dave was connected to. No wonder they end up eventually suing Craig for it, which is exactly what he wants.
It might seem strange to think that Craig could have wanted to be sued for the recovery of Dave Kleiman’s supposed Bitcoin-related wealth, but remember at this point his sole aim is to convince the ATO that he, Craig Wright, is a big player in the Bitcoin sphere and what better way than to face legal action as an OG Miner or even for being part of the ‘Satoshi’ Bitcoin founding legend itself?
As you can see in the email above, which reads like he was putting together a PR piece about himself for use elsewhere, is that Craig is already laying the groundwork for ensuring there is little likelihood of him being found liable for much if he ‘loses’ any legal action which might be brought against him by the Kleiman estate (something which would actually help his claim towards being Satoshi Nakamoto, of course), by the use of phrasing such as “It is unknown how much reverted to Belize and Kleiman”, which will perhaps give him the ability to opt for the angle, “Oh, did Dave not leave any record of his millions for you to locate and recover? Too bad, sucks to be you.” financial-liability-dodging manoeuvre.
Right from the get-go he leads with a 2009 claim that he was mining “some Bitcoins” which, as we have said, he has never provided proof of, before he then charts a course through the fiction that the US company ‘W&K’ was set up, among other things, to mine Bitcoin.
There are also objectively provable explicit lies in this email, for example, the section titled ‘2012’ where Craig claims he formed the two UK companies as trust companies, albeit he couches that by stating they were ‘non trading’ just in case anyone looks them up on the UK Companies House website and sees that they were dormant at this time. Trouble is, as per the ATO document previous to this you can remind yourself that they go on to have the UK formation agent confirm that Craig only purchased these ‘shelf companies’ from them a few months before he sends this email. The same goes for the claim, “Plans from W&K develop to the point where there is imminent product in the eLearning space”, another lie because at this time W&K Info Defense had been notified in May of 2011 that they’d had their US DHS contract proposals rejected and they simply left the company to be marked for administrative dissolution by the registrar in 2012.
The rest of it is the rehashing of the multi-company IP and transaction fraud we’ve already presented the evidence for, including a lengthy overly-verbose description of his fictional ‘MJF deal’ and talk of supposedly pursuing recovery through the courts for what wasn’t delivered, but the other notable lie is where he talks about having “populated Hotwire with some top people” which he claims he paid for “through cashing in Bitcoin”, oh, and a small $1.45 million rebate he’d managed to con out of the taxman. In fact, he claims to have ‘spent’ 450,000 BTC during the period of the 2013 tax year, but of course none of these 450,000 Bitcoin can ever be shown to have been provably owned by Craig, let alone provably spent in actual transactions.
April 28, 2014: Hotwire bankrupt.
“And that is the mess we are in.” — Craig Wright, 3 days ago to Ira Kleiman.
And indeed, a mess. As within 3 months after launch, Craig’s Potemkin Village called Hotwire is no longer able to stay afloat. On this day, McGrath & Nicol are being appointed as Administrators to handle the debt owed to creditors (except “Craig Wright, Ramona Watts and Panopticrypt in the sum of circa $1,437,898 whose claims will remain, only to be enforceable against the company in the event that the company has available assets (after payment of all other creditors in full)”).
Their May 14, 2014 report gives a revealing peek in how Craig’s business was 100% dependant on tax returns, that never came. The following snippet is taken from Nik Cubrilovic’s blog article “Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto”, who wrote this must read monster of an article on May 2, 2016.
“The Company’s main activity was the acquisition of various e-learning and e-payment software and undertaking research and development work in respect of this software and for software owned by related entities. […] The Directors have advised that $30 million was subscribed to by the shareholders in paid up capital and this was injected via Bitcoins. […] The Company applied its equity as follows:
– $29 million to acquire software from the Wright Family Trust (“the Trust”); and
– $1 million to fund day to day trading activities.”
“What Wright did was establish a company for the purpose of carrying out research and development on e-learning software it had acquired from Wrights own trust. Wright would inject $30 million in Bitcoin to fund the company, $29 million of which would be paid to Wright’s trust to acquire the software and $1 million of which would fund operational costs — including an office in Sydney and 40 employees.
The purpose for the structure and why someone could commit fraud in this way becomes clear in the next action the company takes:
Further to incurring a range of expenses, the Company lodged its GST return for the September 2013 quarter, claiming a GST refund of $3.1 million (“the GST refund”). After various discussions and correspondence, the ATO issued a notice to the Company on 20 January 2014 notifying that it intended to withhold the refund pending further verification of transactions and the treatment of Bitcoin.
The sales tax (GST) component of the $29 million invested by Wright into the company was eligible for a refund. Thus by shuffling around some Bitcoin between entities you control yourself, it is possible to trigger a sales tax refund (in real cash).” — Nik Cubrilovic (own blog)
“Wright’s primary MO these past few years, prior to fleeing Australia, was using various entities to create real-dollar tax refunds out of non-existent Bitcoins. I’m surprised it worked for as long as it did.
These cases do explain his motive for why he presented himself as Satoshi Nakamoto.” — Nik Cubrilovic (on Reddit)
To add to Nik’s analysis, this same bookkeeping trick, in large part originating from the two fraudulently obtained NSW Supreme Court claims for almost $57 million in late 2013, supported by a non-existing “mining since 2009 Bitcoin stash” and with help of handfuls of random Bitcoin public addresses with large holdings taken from the Bitcoin rich list that were “assigned rights to”, is repeated several times by Craig Wright, with several companies, several R&D tax rebate and other tax return claims, and for different amounts (but always numbering in the many millions).
In the McGrath & Nicol image above we can find that Craig’s attempt to defraud ATO with Hotwire was about at least a GST Refund of $3,100,000 and a R&D Tax Incentive Claim of $9,600,000 (totalling $12,700,000).
Remember when we asked you to remember the value of Craig’s MtGox balance of $8,050? As you can see above, here Craig’s indirectly claiming that he had a ‘significant exposure’ on Mt Gox which he lost in its collapse, and that is why he can no longer help with funding Hotwire. That ‘significant exposure’ could have saved Hotwire for, like, half a day?
But also remember this, none of his prior ‘funding’ actually involved cash, outside of what he had conned from the Australian taxpayer.
June 2014: Craig adds more Faketoshi hints on his blog.
Let’s dive into a few more examples of how Craig Wright starts trying to mix his online presence into the history of Satoshi Nakamoto and his Bitcoin project. The following showcases are not necessarily all from or around June 2014, but it’s the month where some of them start showing up on WayBack Machine.
The first, and likely one of the oldest examples (there’s a mysterious clue on WayBack Machine that indicates this forgery ‘might’ date back to 2013, but we can’t be sure), is nothing short of hilarious. The backdated to January 10, 2009 blog post “Bitcoin” clearly shows that Craig had not done much research yet into the history of Satoshi Nakamoto and his role in the development and subsequent launch of Bitcoin. As not only was Bitcoin already live since January 3, 2009 (Craig here thinks January 11, 2009 is Bitcoin’s go live date for some reason), but Bitcoin wasn’t called Beta either. Only by October 29, 2009 would Satoshi Nakamoto lift Bitcoin from an Alpha release to a Beta release.
Another blog forgery by Craig, revealed by WikiLeaks, that appears to have been created in the same timeframe, suddenly mentions a “cryptocurrency paper” and “triple entry bookkeeping” inside an existing blog post of August 26, 2008. Also note that his ex-wife Lynn was edited out.
The backdated “Rant” post (also created around June 2014) on Craig’s blog is particularly interesting because of the hints to “trust” and “2020”, which are items that will come back a few months later, in October 2014, when Craig sets up the Tulip Trust fraud.
Of interest here is the line “It sells for $5,000 now.”. Note that Craig (back)dated this blog forgery to the year 2011 in or around June 2014. However, the further we go back in time, this same $5,000 used in the same context, but outed on a different occasion, is planted a year further back in time. This is also signature Craig Wright: can’t keep a storyline straight, because at some point it becomes impossible to remember all the lies told where and when.
June 16, 2014: The Mark Ferrier (MJF Mining) timeline.
Craig Wright, having smelled (temporarily) success with his three New South Wales Supreme Court claims that he — fraudulently — got rewarded in November 2013 and February 2014, apparently thought he could execute this very same type of trick another time.
Now that he had set up several forgeries and false claims around MJF Mining (which had convinced NSW Supreme Court so far), of which several made their way into this article series already, it appears Craig will now try to get another government’s body stamp of approval for tens of millions in fraudulent claims. Next month, July 2014, we will find the following document with all his lies and forgeries neatly laid out in chronological order and called “Proof Of Evidence Craig Wright” back with the… police.
Buckle up. What you’re about to dive into is Craig’s next Potemkin Village to ultimately advance his Australian tax fraud. All 15 pages are worthwhile a read.
The response of the ATO can be found at the end.
The ATO made no prisoners in their judgment of Craig Wright’s attempt to use Mark Ferrier for another multi-million dollar cosplay fraud.
“Siemens and Al Baraka have confirmed that they did not transact with any of MJF or W&K […] MJF has denied supplying you any software […] It follows that these documents (including any related purported invoices or tax invoices) can be considered a nullity based on sham.”
Interestingly, Daily Mail Australia published an article called “Suspected Bitcoin founder ‘paid $85 million’ worth of the cybercurrency to buy gold and software… after ‘being told it was good insurance for his funny money’” on December 14, 2015, in which they inquired Craig’s MJF Mining scam. We can find the following quote, adding legitimacy to the ATO findings:
“Dr Wright alleged he paid Mr Ferrier the value of $38.8m, equivalent to 245,103 Bitcoins, in August 2013 and a further $20.3 million, or 135,000 Bitcoins, the next month.
Later in 2013, Dr Wright launched action against Mr Ferrier in court, however, discontinued it in March 2014, The Australian reported.
On Sunday, Mr Ferrier told The Australian he had ‘never met’ Dr Wright before the legal action, and said the academic had not paid him ‘one cent’.”
Case closed.
July 2014: Craig files MJF Mining complaint at New South Wales Police Force.
The “Proof of Evidence Craig Wright” just showcased in full, appears to have been used and filed as a “Statement of a Witness” at the NSW Police Force. Knowing that the ATO completely debunked the MJF Mining scam as, indeed, a scam (although they described it poetically as a “nullity based on sham”), the sentence “I will be liable to prosecution if I have willfully stated in it anything that I know to be false, or do not believe to be true.” suddenly becomes an interesting one to keep in mind in the upcoming years.
July 10, 2014: The Bitcoin Doco Recordings.
These are currently the oldest known recordings of Craig Wright talking about Bitcoin. Released in a series of three videos only in 2016 on Vimeo, and in 2017 on YouTube, this material of Craig visiting the first Australian Bitcoin Conference in Melbourne, and being interviewed in July 2014 gives an unique insight into his character and where he stood at the time with his Bitcoin knowledge.
Looking at the context of a massive tax fraud going on in the background (that was already under ATO Refund Integrity inquiry, and that had just made Hotwire group go bankrupt 2.5 months earlier), where Bitcoin is provably used by Craig as a mega-million scam tool, it becomes clear that Craig Wright, like any experienced con man, highly depends on playing the “confidence game”(1) in an attempt to impress and defraud the listener. Notice, while using some of the right Bitcoin buzzwords, his preference for general terms, vague language, and long windedness. You will never watch these Bitcoin Doco videos with the same eyes again.
- (1) “any swindle in which the swindler, after gaining the confidence of the victim, robs the victim by cheating at a gambling game, appropriating funds entrusted for investment, or the like” — Collins English Dictionary
August 11, 2014: ATO hearing #3.
By now, we have seen a plethora of fine examples how Craig Wright basically lives in a fantasy world of his own making. A world where he is only out to deceive everyone who enters it. And Craig’s performance during the ATO hearings in 2014 is, again, no exception.
For example, W&K Info Defense Research LLC never received any payment for anything, let alone from Playboy Gaming or other people in the gambling field as we learned earlier.
During this interview, the issue of the software that W&K had supposedly developed, which Craig had ascribed significant value to during his NSW Supreme Court ‘recovery’ action against it, was raised. In the below excerpt Craig has just been asked if he had instructed lawyers during those proceedings and, after responding in the negative, he then confirms that it was he who had conducted the legal actions himself. So the interview asks for further clarification on some pertinent matters relating to the prosecution of this case, namely, the basis by which Craig has ascribed such significant value to the software he’d claimed W&K had developed.
We are all acutely aware at this point that the only thing W&K had ever received from the US DHS has been a letter roundly rejecting their four contract proposals. Something this interviewer, likewise, also knows. They lead with a reference to the pleading documents which he had just had Craig confirm he was entirely responsible for, which state that the software he and Dave had supposedly developed through W&K has significant value because it has been used by the United States military and the Department of Homeland Security.
Craig, clearly now aware he is on thin ice, responds with a non-committal grunt.
The interviewer then asks him to explicitly confirm if this is the case, that the software was used by those entities.
Craig replies with a flurry of vague hand-wavy references to how ill Dave had been, because whatever is wrong it’ll be the dead guy’s fault, right?
But as you read through the rest of this line of questioning, the ATO know exactly what Craig is guilty of on this matter:
There is so much to enjoy about the above excerpt, especially the, ‘we all know exactly what the truth is, Craig’ section where the interviewer informs him, “The Commissioner has done quite a bit of investigative work […] there were no such contracts […] this software was not being used by the US military [or DHS]”, which Craig frantically interrupts with a pleading so desperate you can hear the flop-sweat from here, where he is trying to claim that he didn’t know anything about it, that it’s all, as we said, ‘the dead guy’s fault’.
But, even beyond that hilarious ‘gotcha’ moment, is what comes next, the part where the interviewer then points out to Craig, “But Dave wasn’t giving instructions in the Supreme Court proceedings. That has to be corrected, doesn’t it?” Which actually is really important to understand in all its glorious significance. What he is saying to Craig is that, if the value assigned to the software in the NSW SC case is predicated on it having been utilised by entities such as the US Military and Department of Homeland Security, but that it has subsequently been proven to be a false claim, it would have to be ‘corrected’.
Put simply, even outside of clearly-apparent perjury and fraud committed by Craig in the NSW Supreme Court, his outrageous scheme is predicated on the supposed tens-of-millions of dollars of ‘value’ his legal action had ‘recovered’ for his tax rebate scam, a claimed value which is provably false.
Craig can only muster up a glib, “No, he was dead.” in response.
Another notable moment arrives when a trust in Panama is being discussed during this hearing. As we learned in Part 1 of this series, during the first few months of his Bitcoin related tax fraud that started in the Summer of 2013, Craig had no trusts for ‘his’ Bitcoin that he claimed he had mined or otherwise obtained.
Instead, Craig claimed several times he had full “control” over all his Bitcoin. Then, for tax reasons and under growing audit pressure of ATO late 2013, to be continued strongly in 2014, it became necessary for Craig to put ‘his’ Bitcoin ‘offshore’. As a result, Craig started to come up with (blind) trusts in his explanations, and they were supposedly located all over the world. UK has been mentioned, Seychelles, Belize, Singapore… And Panama.
So here you have it, a trust in Panama not established by Craig Wright, but set up in 2011 for the benefit of the research he is doing. This supposed trust held 1.1 million Bitcoin and software, we learn a bit later in the hearing:
“You have the right to… something.”
Indeed. If only this ‘something’ existed outside Craig’s fantasy.
For some reason, Craig stuck to the country of Panama for a while in 2014 during the ATO audits. And not afraid to back down on a lie on other occasions, during the early stages of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, Craig did the same; he came up with a Panamanian trust, but now backdated to 2009.
For example, we find Craig stating in his May 8, 2019 Declaration:
The Panamanian trust was supposedly called “0133224d” as we learned in another Declaration of Craig Wright a few days later, dated May 13, 2019. How 0133224d relates to the much longer redacted name in the screenshot above is unclear.
Craig Wright also mentioned this trust name in a deposition, discussing both his May 2019 Declarations, on June 28, 2019.
“Q: But it resulted in coin appearing under your possession, as I understand the word “coin” to be?
A: No, it was not under my possession. I mined directly into an algorithm that was owned, and I had set up the Trust 0133224D, was constructed in 1997 in Panama. That was — that is now no longer in existence. That trust —
MS. MCGOVERN: Dr. Wright, please just answer the question with respect to the Bitcoin that you mined in the relevant time period. That was the question.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright
Fun fact: The name of this Panamanian trust appears to be a combination of Craig’s Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Service Number “O133224”, which was appointed to him in August 1989, and the discharge code “D” (MEDICAL) that Craig obtained in October 1990 when he left the RAAF.
On a sidenote, in 1996 Craig would tell a completely different story: “The few months I was unemployed after I left the military because of a confict [sic] of interests I earned money by doing whatever I could get (even though I am an engineer I have worked in a petrol station).”. Does this sound ‘medical’ to you? Nah, probably not.
Anyway, let’s not drift away too far now. Apparently, when Craig started to realize that Ira Kleiman’s counsel would leave no stone unturned in their research, he backtracked completely on the Panamanian trust (as it, of course, didn’t exist). That’s what we see happening here, in a deposition on March 18, 2020:
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q: Did you ever mine Bitcoin into a Panama trust?
A: No, I did not mine Bitcoin into a Panama trust.
And there you have it, Craig Wright caught lying in court again, under penalty of perjury in false declarations and during depositions under oath, as summarized by team Vel Freedman in their epic Omnibus Sanctions Motion:
With this take down of another Craig Wright lie, let’s close the Panama trust chapter. Be assured that the ATO also did not accept the existence of this, or any for that matter, trust. More about that later in this year.
August 18, 2014: ATO hearing #4.
In the next hearing, a week later, we come across another Craig Wright fantasy: being rich and transacting in the hundreds-of-millions of dollars. These big numbers are so easily achieved when you can simply fabricate wealth in your imagination, aren’t they?
Let’s recap from “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”:
- September 20, 2013 — $78,500,000
- October 2, 2013 — $100,000,000
- October 6, 2013 — $230,000,000 ($165,000,000 in XBT)
- January 8, 2014 — $700,000,000
And here appears to have been Craig’s upper limit of his lies about amounts he ‘controlled’. As during the August 18, 2014 hearing he did not raise the “spending capacity” known as “the Bitcoin that we control” any further, and stuck to simply $650,000,000.
Meanwhile, Craig’s dandy lifestyle is nearly wholly (94%) dependent on cash received from his fraudulent tax rebates, remember? The ATO are more than aware of this and at this point are clearly at the stage of interview questions that allow Craig to explicitly confirm his lies to them, for what would come later. For now, they are just giving him enough rope…
September 9, 2014: Craig creates HighSecured invoice forgery.
Multiple court cases, both historic and current, have exposed Craig’s reliance on fraudulent and forged ‘evidence’ to support whatever his claimed position is at any given moment. For somebody who professes to be the world foremost expert on, well, pretty much everything IT related, he has demonstrated an almost-laughable incompetence when it comes to covering his tracks.
Below is a cut from the Expert Witness report of Dr Edman, who found dozens of forgeries in the Kleiman v Wright case. Among them, a backdated to March 10, 2014 HighSecured invoice, recreated on September 9, 2014 from a 4Cabling invoice created on August 22, 2014.
For context, Craig attempted to fool the ATO into believing that his business activities related to his extensive R&D and GST rebate claims were legitimate and had substance. Part of that effort, in this case, involved his faking an invoice from the offshore cloud hosting service, HighSecured.com, which was based in Panama. So he takes a ‘4Cabling’ invoice he had to hand and… just… edits it!
And unsurprisingly, when Vel Freedman (head lawyer of the Ira Kleiman team) is discussing these HighSecured invoices with Craig Wright during a deposition on March 18, 2020, it’s a bit of a struggle to get a straight answer out of him.
“Q: Let me make it easy for us. For the documents we have just reviewed, is it your testimony — strike that. Dr. Wright, did you create the invoices that we just reviewed from HighSecured?
A: No. Those invoices were actually pulled up directly from HighSecured servers while the Australian Tax Office were in our office while our lawyers were there, while external accountants were there.
Q: Let me just re-ask the question on a clear way. Did you or did you instruct anyone to create the invoices that we reviewed today?
A: We had gone through purchasing and invoicing processes through the company accounts, so the accounts system in DeMorgan and the payment — what do you call it? There was a client interface on the Panamanian servers, so we did our orders on that.
Q: Dr. Wright, that was not my question. My question was did you or did you direct anyone to create the invoices we looked at today?
A: If you are asking did I say the purchase was to go through, then yes I told my — —
Q: Let me clarify the question.
A: You said “or direct”.
Q: Yes. Did you or did you direct anyone to create the actual invoice we saw, the document we saw? Did you direct or did you create the actual invoice we looked at?
A: No. I don’t create any documents to do with accounting. I am not the accountant, I don’t run any accounts. I go to the accounting team and the other teams and I, basically, instruct people if there is a large purchase that has gone through board sign off and I say “please do X”.
Q: Dr. Wright, I do not think you are trying to be evasive here. I am just trying to get a clean record. Did you instruct somebody to create this invoice so it looked like it was from HighSecured when it was not really from HighSecured?
A. No.
MR. RIVERO: Objection. I don’t want to interrupt Mr. Freedman’s examination, but can you just answer whether you instructed anyone to fake this invoice.
A. No one is instructed to fake an invoice.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q: Did you instruct anyone or did you yourself fake the e-mail communications between the — strike that. Did you or did you instruct anyone to fake the e-mail communications we have reviewed that purport to come from HighSecured or Ritzela De Gracia?
A: No. There was no point where anyone was instructed to make any fraudulent or faked documents at any point. During the sending of some of those e-mails I was sitting with counsel Andrew Sommer in Australia and with the accountants that ran this. I did not even touch the computer, I was not there, but Ali Lodey — I don’t know how to spell the last name — the account and other people demonstrated access to the server directly from HighSecured to the ATO, where the information was downloaded. I watched that happen.
Q: Were you ever pretending to be Ritzela De Gracia in these communications?
A: No. At one point Ritzela De Gracia — —
Q: Please finish your answer, but I don’t really need anything beyond yes or no. I wanted to get us through this.
A: That’s fine. I can end there.
MR. RIVERO: Mr. Freedman, you cannot — —
MR. FREEDMAN: I did say he can finish if he wants. I know it is not a comfortable line of questioning, I am trying to get us through it.
MR. RIVERO: He is answering your
questions. Let him finish. Go ahead, Doctor.
A: No. I at one point I was on the phone with people from HighSecured and Andrew Sommer separately in the room.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q: Dr. Wright, were you pretending to be HighSecured in these communications?
A: No. I was in the room with multiple people and Andrew Sommer, receiving e-mails that I was not sending because I was in a meeting. So, no, that was never the case.
Q: Did you instruct anyone to masquerade as Ritzela or HighSecured for these communications?
A: No, at no point did I ever instruct anyone to do that.
Q: Did you ever control the Bit-message account we saw that was affiliated with HighSecured?
A: No, I did not.
Q: Dr. Wright, did you ever register www.highsecured.net?
A: No.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright
Craig even, as he also did for his fake ‘MJF’ Banking Software deal, had something of a pantomime ‘log on’ to the supposed HighSecured ‘customer portal’ performed for the ATO to see these high-value expenses listed directly.
Only, as is clear at the end of the above questioning, it would appear that, rather than the official .com domain for HighSecured, a different .net domain was involved.
... and, as ever, when the question of how any of this was being paid for, Craig has a convenient funding explanation, his millions held on the defunct ‘Liberty Reserve’ platform. But, as the ATO points out…
“The screenshot differs from other publicly available screenshots of Liberty Reserve Transaction History screens around the same time in terms of graphics, layout, text, font and colour.”
October 2014: The start of the Tulip Trust saga.
Ah, yes, the ‘Tulip Trust’. How fitting that ‘Satoshi’ would have created a Trust named after the very historical event that Bitcoin’s exchange market is endlessly compared to, right?
Except, of course, he didn’t. It is just another front in his Potemkin Village of fakery, fraud and forgeries.
The Seychelles company, ‘Tulip Trading Ltd’ is the company vehicle which Craig claimed he incorporated in 2011 as the trust company for the ‘Tulip Trust’ to hold the hundreds of thousands of BTC he pretends he purchased through the millions of USD he claims he held on the aforementioned Liberty Reserve platform… that Craig failed to fake credible screenshots of.
He has also claimed that another Seychelles company, ‘Wright International Investments Ltd’ is part of this ‘Tulip Trust’ structure, only this company is supposedly for holding the many hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin he likes to pretend he mined as ‘Satoshi’ from the very first block-reward right through to 2011, no, strike that, what he meant to say, officer, is he only mined as Satoshi up until August 2010… because he keeps getting exposed for claiming ‘Satoshi’ addresses which turn out to be not-Satoshi addresses.
Let’s be perfectly clear about these false claims: There has never been proof of ANY Bitcoin mining done by Craig Wright, whether it be in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 or 2013 and the same goes for his claims of buying large quantities (and the threshold is 50 here) in that period. Every lie and every forgery that Craig Wright provided over the years to support these wild claims has been thoroughly debunked as such.
Truth is, the Tulip Trust or anything like it, didn’t exist before October 2014.
Sure, the above Certificate of Incorporation shows that Tulip Trading Limited existed from 21st July 2011, so that covers Craig’s ‘evidence’ he furnished the ATO with concerning Tulip Trust-related agreements and declarations from that year, right… right?
Of course not, it’s just more sloppy historical revisionism where Craig likes to believe we’re all as dumb as he believes himself to be smart.
But before we show you how devastatingly ‘not-smart’ Craig actually is, we ask why was he compelled to conjure up this ‘Tulip Trust’ in the first place? It’s simple: Craig had 1,650,000 reasons to cobble together a supposed trust in his Australian tax fraud scheme in October 2014, as he desperately had to avoid paying $1.65 million GST to the ATO for some of the Bitcoin transactions he’d faked.
Let’s break this down a bit more (taken from an article written by Arthur van Pelt about a year ago “The Faketoshi Fifteen (Times Two)”, with additional sourcing from his very informative tweetstorm: Craig Wright — Tulip Trust Revisited).
- As we know now: there was not any physical trust thing in Craig Wright’s Faketoshi lies & forgeries before October 2014; in 2013/2014 Craig initially claimed to ATO to have full control over his (non-existing) Bitcoin stash, and only hinted a few times to “offshore trusts”. And although requested by ATO several times, Craig never signed one of the Bitcoin addresses he claimed to control.
- Things changed dramatically halfway 2014 when Craig Wright was notified by the ATO that he had to pay $1,650,000 in GST.
- In order to *fix* this, Craig asked a Seychelles Corporate Services firm called Abacus (Seychelles) Limited in October 2014 for a list of pre-incorporated ‘shelf’ companies available to buy. He choose, ordered and paid for one company called ‘Tulip Trading Ltd’, which they had formed in July 2011.
- Craig Wright also bought a domain called TulipTrading.net in the same month. And at the same time he’d created several backdated forgeries, like emails, deeds and contracts, to fake a non-existing line of events, as if this Tulip Trust thing was always part of his Bitcoin dealings before October 2014. It wasn’t, of course.
- The ATO, of course, noticed these fraudulent events too, and called it “a scheme”, that Craig Wright “altered to insert the Seychelles trust to which you transferred the Bitcoin” (see following screenshot).
Beautiful bookkeeping trick, isn’t it? Only, the ATO didn’t buy it. They mapped out everything that appeared inconsistent and fraudulent about the Tulip Trust, all the way up to the PGP keys and Bitmessage emails used, and summarized their findings in one of their reports.
It’s nothing short of hilarious to witness Craig Wright’s infamous sloppiness when it comes to most of his forgeries: he actually sent a June 2011 AND an October 2014 version of the same forgery to the ATO.
Pick one, officer!
And it all ended up with the ATO stating in 2016: “We do not accept that the Seychelles Trust existed as a matter of law or fact”. Meaning, the Tulip Trust never existed, does not exist now and therefore does not contain any Bitcoin either.
- And if that wasn’t enough, the court in Florida in the Kleiman v Wright case came to the same conclusion in 2019: “The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists.”
Another nail in the coffin of Tulip Trust came after January 2020, when Craig Wright was ordered to come up with the Tulip Trust Bitcoin addresses list in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Several expert witnesses like Antonopoulos and Boedeker checked the content of this list, and discovered many inconsistencies, summarized in “Craig Wright — Tulip Trust. Done. Over and Out.”. Also Sam Williams broke down several aspects of the Tulip Trust in his article “The Tulip Trust is fake. Here are 3 reasons why.”.
And if this wasn’t enough already, in May 2020 145 addresses on the Tulip Trust list were signed by their true owners: “Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud.”
Et voila. The roots of Tulip Trust, and the utter destruction of this fraudulent setup in the years after. But please note that Craig Wright is still using this empty trust vehicle in his fraudulent claims and scammery in and outside courts up till today, and being repeated by his UK law firm Ontier. This will, of course, not end well for all involved.
October 31, 2014: Let’s round out the year with Craig pretending to own yet another supercomputer. This is where ‘Tulip Trading’ joins ‘C01N’ in Craig’s Potemkin Village as not just the ATO, but supercomputer-supplier SGI, themselves, go on to prove.
For the whole of 2014, Craig didn’t post much on his blog, with two exceptions, both times about his supercomputers. This is one of them. Those who know how this supercomputers story is going to end, can start ROFL-ing about “1160 Xeon cores” and “both systems in the top 500” now.
Craig also provides some more information on the Cloudcroft website, in a blog article called “Introducing Cloudcroft” a day earlier:
“Now, many of you will probably think mining Bitcoin, if we are going to be running a large supercomputer, well, would you want to mine Bitcoin? This is our second one, and back in the day, you could have mined a lot of Bitcoin on the previous generation that we were running, it was mainly graphics cards so GPU based and at the time that would have been comparable to many of the other people out there. Now, however, it is a little bit different, and even then we weren’t actually mining, what we were doing, is a whole lot of PSOs, this is optimising code, so evolutionary programming etc. One of the things we are now doing, is we are finding that even if we wanted to mine, the Xenon PHIs aren’t terribly good as miners, but they are really great at running lot of those really, really, highly parallel code. It takes a lot of tuning and a lot of effort to get it right, but once you do, the results are wonderful. I mean, they are incredible, the speed of these machines, the access to the amount of ram that we get, when we are running up… I think we are running 770 Peta Bytes of Ram at the moment on the cluster. It’s quite amazing when you consider just how much there is.” — Craig Wright
November 2014: Craig Wright applies for a job at Bitcoin Foundation (but did he?) and he managed to get the Tulip Trading/C01N supercomputer in the Top500 list on #64.
The first anecdote this month is about Craig sending an email with what is initially perceived as a job application to Bitcoin Foundation. From Early Years Part 1 we remember that Craig had put himself on the Lifetime Member list of Bitcoin Foundation around April 2013, to support his Hotwire Bitcoin Bank scam which went bankrupt earlier in 2014. But this is of course a completely different story.
Taken from a February 26, 2020 deposition with Gavin Andresen in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit:
Q: Okay. Strike the question. When did you first learn of Craig Wright?
A: Again, I’m very bad with dates, but Jon Matonis sent me an email saying that I should pay attention to this person, Craig Wright, back in whatever year that was — sorry. 2020, ’19 — ‘17? 17 ‘18?
Q: Did there come a time before that where Craig Wright applied for a job at the Bitcoin Foundation?
A: Yes. When I was responding to the subpoena for this lawsuit, I went back through my old emails, and I did get an email from a Craig Wright asking for a job at the Bitcoin Foundation that I never responded to and, frankly, I had not recalled until I went through my old emails.
MR. FREEDMAN: So I’m gonna hand you what’s been marked as Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 2. And it’s — for the record, it’s Bates Gavin 1296.
(Exhibit 2 marked for identification.)
Q: Do you recognize this email?
A: Yes.
Q: And is it fair to say this is Jodie Brady, at the Bitcoin Foundation, forwarding you a job application that she had received?
A: Yes.
Q: And the job application is from Craig S. Wright with the email address craig@panopticrypt.com?
A: That’s —
MR. KASS: Object to form.
THE STENOGRAPHER: Wait. What’s the address?
MR. FREEDMAN: Craig@panopticrypt. P-A-N-O-P-T-I-C-R-Y-P-T.
MR. KASS: And object to form.
Q: So, from time to time, either myself or Mr. Kass, depending on who’s asking questions, may object to form. You can just pause, let them object, and then you can answer the question.
A: Okay. Yes.
Q: Okay. Do you — did you review this job application back in November 2014 when you got it?
A: No.
Q: You didn’t even see it?
A: I don’t recall.
Q: Okay. It’s fair to say he did not get a job with the Bitcoin Foundation?
A: He did not.
Q: Looking back at it now, would he have fit the criteria you were looking for?
MR. KASS: Object to form.
A: We were not actively looking for people, there was no job opening, so there was no criteria.
Q: Fair enough.”
One day later, Gavin Andresen is questioned by Craig’s Wright’s lawyer Mr Kass. The next quote is taken from the February 27, 2020 deposition with Gavin Andresen in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit:
“Q. Now, I’m going to turn to what is previously marked as number 2. So going all the way down to the bottom of the pile.
MR. KASS: And, Vel, just to make it easier, it’s GAVIN_1296.
MR. FREEDMAN: Is that a new document?
MR. KASS: No. This was introduced yesterday by you as Exhibit 2.
MR. FREEDMAN: Wait, hold on. GAVIN_1296?
MR. KASS: Yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: One second please.
MR. KASS: I could describe it for you, but I just don’t want to coach.
MR. FREEDMAN: I got it.
MR. KASS: Okay.
BY MR. KASS:
Q. Do you recall this document?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you recall testifying about it yesterday?
A. Yes.
Q. And do you recall being asked whether Dr. Wright had applied for a job at the 6 foundation where you were working?
A. Yes.
Q. Now, I would like you to actually look at the e-mail from Dr. Wright, and could you point to the portion where he says he’s applying for a job?
A. He does not say that he’s applying for a job.
Q. And, in fact, does he say, “I do not want to be paid”?
A. He does say “I do not want to be paid,” yes.
Q. Does it appear more that he’s just asking to collaborate with you?
A. Uh —
Q. When you received this, what did you interpret it as?
A. When I received —
MR. FREEDMAN: Objection.
A. I received this from the secretary of the Bitcoin Foundation —
Q. Mm-hmm.
A. — and she presented it as a resume. She used the term “resume.” And so, therefore, I assumed that it was somebody looking for a job. I — at the time, we weren’t looking for anybody. And so until discovery from the subpoena —
Q. Sure.
A. — I hadn’t thought about this document at all.
Q. Okay. And now that you’ve taken a second to look at this document today, do you still believe it would be accurate to state that Dr. Wright was looking for a job with the foundation?
A. No. Now that I read it closely, I think it would be more accurate to say he was looking for some sort of collaboration.
Q. And one other thing. Do you actually know if it was Dr. Wright who sent this e-mail?
A. No. I don’t know.
Q. And it would be fair to say because you just see an e-mail address, you don’t know who actually typed it or sent it?
A. Correct. I have no idea if craig@panopticrypt.com is actually the Dr. Craig Wright I met in London.
Q. And even if it was, you still don’t know who actually typed it and sent it, correct?
A. Correct.”
So far for the job application that was actually more of a collaboration proposal from Craig’s side, but either way, it is pretty inconceivable that our self-proclaimed Satoshi candidate, who handed the Bitcoin project to Gavin Andresen only 3 years earlier, and who knows about Bitcoin Foundation since at least April 2013, did not contact Gavin Andresen directly.
Inconceivable.
Because what better way is there for Craig to absolutely, unequivocally prove to the terribly persistent doubting-Thomas which is the ATO, who simply won’t let him be at peace with the many millions of dollars he has scammed in a multitude of fraudulent R&D and GST rebates, than showing them his supercomputer is actually listed in the esteemed ‘Top 500’ list, right?
Only, the fact is the authors of the ‘Top500’ list relied solely on Craig’s own claims as to the existence of his supposed supercomputer.
The ATO, as we saw in Part 1, go on to roundly excoriate him over these faked machines, but we’ll let the supposed supplier, SGI, have the last word for Part 2, as per their comment when asked by ZDNet in December 2015:
So Craig has spent 2014 digging himself deeper and deeper into his supercomputer lies, his faked business transactions and his faked Bitcoin ownership, 2015 will only see things getting far, far, worse for his tangled web and, ultimately has him fleeing Australia after having fooled a credulous billionaire into believing that he is Satoshi. As you’ll see in Part 3, you literally couldn’t make it up… but Craig will certainly give it go!
So please come back for Part 3, where we will cover the whole year of 2015, an era with even more lies, more forgeries, and more Faketoshi drama.
Thanks for reading.
To be continued… In Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 3
