Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 3
Written by Arthur van Pelt, with assistance from CryptoDevil
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material might become available after publication of this article, it will have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, to become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
We hope you truly enjoyed:
- “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”
- “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2”
Let’s recap Part 2, which covers the whole of 2014, for a bit before we continue with Part 3 which will cover the year 2015. This will also bring us to the closure of this epic series. Spoiler alert, in 2015 Craig’s Bitcoin related Potemkin Village will be completely demolished by the ATO, leaving Craig desperately looking for a multi-million-dollar bailout, then fleeing Australia and setting up camp in London after having convinced a credulous billionaire to believe in his discredited and extraordinarily-tall tales of billion-dollar Bitcoin stashes and blue-chip IP supposedly made all-the-more valuable by his up-till-today unproven claim to be ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.
February 2014
Craig is feeling the pressure from the ATO investigators, who are clearly not swallowing his contrived story of hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of Bitcoin-based business transactions he has based multiple multi-million-dollar cash rebate claims on, Bitcoin he can provide no evidence for ever having owned in the first place, leading him to commit to the next step of his desperate plan. Some ten months after the death of his friend he emails Dave Kleiman’s family in the US and tells them that he and David were, “two of the three key people behind Bitcoin”.
That is how he, with support of Dave’s family, intends to explain away to the ATO how he, Craig Wright, could have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of BTC — by staking claim to the famed ‘Satoshi Stash’!
As for Dave’s family, he just strings them along for several years with repeated talk of potential billions in wealth they could be in line for, persistently changing the narrative as he progresses it, conjuring up supposed ‘offshore trusts’ and, ultimately, offering them shares in his companies in return for them signing away their rights to it all, so as to avoid the one thing he cannot actually do, send any of the Bitcoin anywhere. Because to do that, one would actually have to have the private keys and, until proven otherwise, the only person who would have those keys is the real ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.
Back to 2014. Craig went through a year of further ATO scrutiny, and at least four hearings and meetings with the ATO would be scheduled, where we find Craig making the most outrageous claims about his Bitcoin holdings, hinting to offshore trusts all over the globe, and finally setting one up in October 2014: the empty shelf company Tulip Trading Ltd will become, with numerous backdated forgeries, one of the outlets forming the infamous Tulip Trust.
As we have evidenced in the previous two articles, there have been several of Craig Wright’s frauds, running into the 100s of millions of dollars in false bookkeeping, exposed so far:
- The multitude of contradictory claims of Bitcoin spends where he cannot show ever having controlled the Bitcoin addresses when asked to by the ATO
- The David Rees cosplay — His claims of large Bitcoin payments by supposedly posting private keys of wallet addresses to the elderly and dementia-suffering Professor David Rees, for ‘consulting’; something the Professor’s family rejected as a complete fabrication
- The Deborah Kobza cosplay — The fraudulent claims of massive multi-millions-dollar business transactions he supposedly conducted for GICSR, a wholly outrageous assertion for a small non-profit organisation which never occurred, according to the court deposition of its own founder, Deborah Kobza
- The UK companies fraud — His purchasing of ‘readymade’ off-the-shelf companies from a UK formation agent, for which he dishonestly created backdated contracts and legal filings dated years prior to when he had actually bought them, in an attempt to deceive the ATO investigators
- A Seychelles ‘readymade’ company ‘Tulip Trading Ltd’ he bought which, again, he tried faking backdated trust documents for
- The Mark Ferrier/MJF Mining fraud — A multi-million-dollar ‘deal’ with a fugitive conman for, industrial mining software, gold ore and banking software, for which the ‘proof’ he supplied to the ATO was exposed by them as being faked, with email chains from domains which didn’t exist at the date of the email, to ‘support’ services for the banking software from a domain purchased on his own credit card and fake software licenses
- The NSW Supreme Court fraud — His false representations to the NSW Supreme Court, where in his attempt to ‘astroturf’ value to his fraudulent tax rebates, he executed a pantomime ‘recovery’ of multi-million-dollars-worth of bitcoin and IP from the dormant US company Dave Kleiman had set up. Falsely claiming that the US DoD and DHS had used software he’d developed, as well as staking claim to non-existent bitcoin he’d loaned it
… and so we continue with Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 3.
Disclaimer: The reader will see, at times, the $ symbol being used. Since Craig Wright lived in Australia in the timeframe of these articles, the $ symbol used in numbers related to Craig will always refer to the Australian dollar (AUD), except where indicated otherwise.
Spring/Summer 2015: Bitcoin Belle introduces Craig Wright in the Bitcoin community.
Roughly late first, or in the second quarter of 2015, Craig starts infiltrating in the Bitcoin community. On Twitter, but also in real life. Crucial in this point of time is Bitcoin Belle (real name: Michele Seven). Michele was interviewed by Hackernoon (writer: OrphanBlocks) in April 2018, and we learned quite a few interesting tidbits about Craig Wright’s wheelings and dealings in 2015.
The following quotes are all taken from the Hackernoon article, intertwined with a few notes and comments from the undersigned between […].
“It’s no stretch to say that Craig Wright is a bonafide “personality” in the blockchain space regardless of whether he actually is Satoshi… and it’s quite interesting to explore how he actually got there.
[Note: It is true that, as of writing the Hackernoon article in April 2018, Craig Wright had indeed become a notorious ‘personality’ in the blockchain space. After the December 2015 Wired/Gizmodo turmoil, and the May 2016 signing sessions debacle, labelling him as ‘bonafide’ is a bit of a stretch though, of course.]
The answer of course is through Bitcoin Belle.
Here is a very quick rundown (for those of you that did not have the pleasure of being around in 2015) of the “version of events” that most people seem to believe:
- Craig contacts Bitcoin Belle in early 2015. Convinces her that he is Satoshi. The two begin a relationship of sorts. [Note: The two begin a relationship seemingly predicated on Craig convincing Michelle of his wealth, power, high-level contacts, hacking abilities, whatever it took to reel her in on the idea he could potentially ‘fix’ a family problem of hers which, in her desperation to believe he could be some sort of ‘deus ex machina’ in the face of her distressing situation, she fell for, hook, line and sinker.]
- Bitcoin Belle introduces Craig to a bunch of other influencers and uses her own credibility in the space to get him onto panels and conferences. People like John Matonis, Roger Ver and Gavin Andresen [Note: it is uncertain if Gavin Andresen is already aware of Craig Wright at this point in time: Summer 2015] believe Craig is Satoshi and risk their reputations to support him.
- Craig drops Bitcoin Belle once he has enough contacts and introductions. The two stop speaking until Bitcoin Belle arranges a panel event later that year [We will come back to this panel in greater detail later] with a host of big names including Nick Szabo, who until that point had not made a public appearance in forever.
- Craig takes the bait, accepts a place on the panel but does not use the conference to announce himself as Satoshi. Bitcoin Belle does not press further with her questions (perhaps still believing he might be Satoshi) and Nick Szabo only has a limited tussle with Craig much to Bitcoin Belle’s chagrin.
- Craig Wright once he has seduced enough of the community eventually announces himself as Satoshi … but as mentioned earlier, the proof he provides is found to be not sufficient [Note: the supposed proof is quickly exposed by multiple Bitcoin and cryptography experts as being nothing but a pubkey copy of an old, blockchain-viewable, Satoshi-transaction] and as a result the community turns on him and Bitcoin Belle for facilitating his introduction.
She made introductions for Craig to Jon Matonis and Roger Ver. The former was unable to find the US$2 million that Craig needed but until recently performed the role of Vice President at nChain (Craig’s company).
Roger however was more than happy to jump at the opportunity of helping “Satoshi” as long as Craig was able to provide some form of crypto-graphical proof. Craig provided the same proof that was refuted by the community a few months later, but Roger was easily duped at this point.”
Taken from Hackernoon “Bitcoin Belle’s CCme: The woman who brought you Craig ‘Satoshi’ Wright strikes again…”
Now read that last paragraph again… Is it remotely possible that Roger Ver loaned, or gave, Craig Wright US$2,000,000 for a fake signing in 2015? On the other hand, when Roger and Craig nuked their relationship in November 2018, Craig send Roger an email, implying there was never proof provided. Or, in the alternative, Roger had found out the signing was… fake?
Again we see Craig Wright here in full petulant-child angry-tantrum mode, as usual whenever his ‘reality’ is being challenged. For nearly twenty years of documented history, from DeMorgan to his ‘Satoshi’ cosplay, you can see examples of how he ropes in gullible investors by masquerading as a world-class expert in whichever field his con is related to, before turning on them when the charade is exposed and he is held to account. So at all times, this is again a perfect example how Craig is attempting to defraud governments and gullible, rich investors.
March 26, 2015: The SGI letter forgery.
Remember October 2013, when Craig filed the “Sukuriputo Okane” supercomputer project for R&D tax rebates? In March 2015, the ATO is starting to inquire into this ‘multi-million-dollar project’, so Craig quickly forges a fake SGI letter and puts it on the CloudCroft website — another Potemkin-village facade, of course.
If you’ve read the previous articles in the series, when it comes to just how inept Craig is at these fakes and forgeries, you surely know what is coming next…
March/April 2015: The “Sukuriputo Okane” project starts falling apart.
The ATO, having visited the premises of Craig Wright as part of their in-depth and (still-to-this-day!) ongoing investigation into Craig Wright and his supposed multi-million-dollar business activities find… drum roll please… no evidence that this supercomputer exists at all.
And as a result, the ever-suitable Faketoshi mantra “[Craig Wright] had not provided any evidence” can be found two handfuls of times, in different shapes and forms, in the relevant section of one of the ATO reports. He won’t be holding back on the wildly fabricated R&D claims just yet, though, because at this time Craig has only had the visit, but not the report of their findings yet, findings which are painfully detailed:
April 17, 2015: Craig Wright calls for a meeting with barrister Heydon Miller (from Level 22 Chambers), lawyer Andrew Sommer (from law firm Clayton Utz) and his wife Ramona Ang.
Reason: the upcoming week he will have a “face to face meeting with Stefan Matthews who represents and runs Calvin Ayres’ investment trust to look at an initial bridging loan and a first round $2 million investment”.
Craig Wright’s $15 million bail out is starting to take shape. And Calvin Ayre will be massively defrauded in the process. Keep reading, dear reader.
May 2015: Craig adjusts the June 2014 “Bitcoin” blog forgery.
In a really-weak attempt to pretend like he wants to cover-up his since-proven-to-be-a-backdated-fake January 10, 2009 Bitcoin ‘launch’ post, Craig goes back and deletes that fake, to replace it with another, albeit, rather than remove reference to Bitcoin he leaves it there knowing that credulous investigators can see his previous ‘I am implying that I am Satoshi’ version viewable on the Wayback Machine.
May 11, 2015: DeMorgan $54 million R&D tax rebate announced.
But just when you start thinking, this will be the end of Craig Wright’s false claims, his lies and forgeries are exposed, and he will finally back down… that’s not how it works with Craig. He will always try to double down, cover up an old lie with a new lie, push old forgeries aside as “the dog ate my homework”, or, to stick with his years long narrative, “I was hacked”.
So Craig wrapped the smoking remains of the bankrupt Hotwire Group together under a new label DeMorgan Group, and tried the same tax fraud again for even larger numbers. It started with a bogus press release without any footing in reality. AusIndustry has no records of this mega claim.
The full press release — pulled from Craig Wright’s ass — reads:
Australia’s fastest Top500 HPC is dedicated to Cryptocurrency and smart contract research
Sydney, NSW, May 11, 2015– DeMorgan Ltd is please to advise that the companies in its controlled group have satisfied the requisite criteria under AusIndustry’s R&D Tax Incentive Scheme for an advance finding with respect to R&D activities conducted in the development of smart contract and Blockchain based technologies.
Under the scheme, companies with a turnover of less than $20 million are entitled to a cash refund of up to 45 cents per dollar spent on eligible research and development activity. Accordingly, DeMorgan Ltd and controlled companies is eligible to receive up to approximately $54,000,000 R&D cash rebate for R&D activities conducted in the 2014/2015 financial year.
CEO Dr Craig Wright said “This rebate will strengthen the group’s cash position and is an important source of funds for our development activities. We acknowledge the Government’s support of important R&D activities, and we look forward to the successful commercialisation of our Blockchain and smart contract systems research.”
The approval of the largest Research and Development Advance Finding and Core Technology reviews in Australian history from AusIndustry for Coin-Exch Pty Ltd, Denariuz Pty Ltd and Cloudcroft Pty Ltd and related companies in our group have allowed us to tune our Supercomputers to an Rmax (Tflop/s): 2,468.15 and 939.67 respectively. We expect that this will place us in the top 20 super computers globally and the fastest computer managed in the southern hemisphere accelerating Australia into a position that is well above its weight. This will result in increased technology development in Australia and help lead our country into a global leadership position.
Our CEO, Dr Wright is excited that this will allow us to start accelerating crypto currency and smart contract and property research to new levels in the southern hemisphere and to create opportunities in Australia that have not been imagined before.
In the coming years, we will be looking to expand our involvement in the region with the creation of a combined CuDA/Xeon Phi hybrid system that we are looking to develop in conjunction with SGI. Success in this endeavor would make Australia a global leader in HPC technology as well as in the emerging crypto-currency financial fields.
Mr McKeon of SGI has stated that they “look forward to a long, sustained relationship” and that together our companies will reach the highest ranks of the Top500 list.
Our company, Interconnected Research Pty Ltd is the only government authorized R&D research provider and accelerator dedicated to fostering crypto-currency specific research with the ability to allow companies to claim up to 43.5 cents in every dollar back as a rebate through the AusIndustry R&D program.
As a way of returning something to the community we are offering a free course on our systems and providing access to one of the world’s fastest HPC systems in conjunction with IT Masters and Charles Sturt University.
DeMorgan is a pre-IPO Australian listed company focused on alternative currency, next generation banking and reputational and educational products with a focus on security and creating a simple user experience. In the six years since the first company in the group started, we have completed several Bitcoin based research projects that have lasted over 6 years and are now ready to start commercialisation.”
One week later, the fake press release — again, pulled from Craig Wright’s ass — was picked up by media outlet Grant Central, who wrote:
“Adding to the big numbers, DeMorgan Ltd announced in a press release that it had received Australia’s largest R&D Advanced Finding from AusIndustry and would as such be eligible to receive approximately $54,000,000 in R&D cash rebate for the R&D activities conducted in the 2014/15 financial year.” — Grant Central, May 18, 2015
This is the last time that we hear about R&D tax rebates from Craig Wright. From here onward, the storm that had been brewing since ATO’s Refund Integrity department started their inquiry late 2013 into Craig’s fraudulent tax return claims, events would quickly start to spiral downward.
Nik Cubrilovic, who, as an Australian citizen, witnessed events from close by, noted on Reddit and on his blog:
“I don’t think the $54 million refund was ever paid, but he was paid earlier $6M and ~$2M refunds — he became more brazen but the last figure was too much even for the ATO (it was a larger claim than what even Google or Atlassian make)
There is also the sales tax case where the ATO found against him and penalized his company, Hotwire, $1.7 million. The way this worked is Wright funded the company with $30 million worth of Bitcoin. The company then purchased software from another Wright entity for $29 million. The first company then made a sales tax refund claim for this purchase and sought ~$3 million as a refund. What Wright was effectively doing was creating $3 million in real-cash refund from the tax office by transferring imaginary Bitcoins between himself. I detail how this worked in my blog post from yesterday.
That entity went from being founded to shutdown in months. The DeMorgan entity seemed to exist solely to make R&D claims from the Australian government.
Wright’s primary MO these past few years, prior to fleeing Australia, was using various entities to create real-dollar tax refunds out of non-existent Bitcoins. I’m surprised it worked for as long as it did.
These cases do explain his motive for why he presented himself as Satoshi Nakamoto.” — Nik Cubrilovic on Reddit
Nik went the extra mile in his inquiry of what happened in this era, and spoke with several eyewitnesses. From his epic blog post of May 2, 2016 called “Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto” we take the following quote:
“The experience of those who have worked for or know Craig Wright. Sydney is a global city but in many ways it is a small town — I found out after the Wired report that I knew two people who had worked for Wright. Since the stories published today I have come to hear — either directly or second-hand — from a number of other people who either worked for or knew Wright. The conclusion is near-unanimous: Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, and is not capable of being Satoshi Nakamoto. One friend described how Wright is so convincing that even tho he knew he wasn’t capable of creating Bitcoin, he would at times even doubt himself. Another said that Wright has everybody convinced for at least a short period — but then it begins to unravel as his actions do not match his word. He came away from his experience convinced that Wright is a fraud. Yet another person who worked for Wright characterized him (via a third-party) as “the best conman i’ve ever met”.” — Nik Cubrilovic
May 29, 2015: Craig tweets about his 2 supercomputers.
Notice that Craig puts a hashtag with SGI in his tweet, as if SGI had something to do with Craig Wright and the supercomputers mentioned. That remains to be seen, though, as in December 2015 ZDNet figured a few things out about SGI. They wrote about these findings in their article “SGI denies links with alleged bitcoin founder Craig Wright”. A few quotes:
“However, Cassio Conceicao, SGI EVP and chief operating officer, has told ZDNet that despite this, SGI has never had any contact with Cloudcroft or Wright. “Cloudcroft has never been an SGI customer and SGI has no relationship with Cloudcroft CEO Craig Steven Wright,” he said.
Conceicao added that SGI has no record of the C01N supercomputer being purchased or serviced by the firm. The C01N supercomputer, which was placed at number 17 on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputer in November [2015], is another supercomputer that Wright apparently owns. It was allegedly created when Wright merged C01N and Tulip Trading, Cloudcroft’s supposed flagship supercomputer, into a single high performance computer. “SGI has no record of the CO1N supercomputer ever being purchased or serviced from SGI, therefore SGI suspects it may have been purchased on the grey market,” Conceicao said. “SGI does not operate, maintain, or provide any services for this supercomputer.”” — Aimee Chanthadavong (ZDNet)
Note that SGI/Conceicao is implying that Craig Wright ‘could’ have bought an actual supercomputer on the grey market. This, we will learn further down the road, didn’t happen either. But at this moment in time SGI didn’t and couldn’t know better, and they needed to carefully hedge on their statement as they could not explicitly claim (yet) that Craig didn’t have any supercomputer at all.
June 10, 2015: On this day, Calvin Ayre writes up an intermediate summary of how Craig Wright’s bail out should be formed according to him. Note how Craig’s lies, forgeries and fraudulent actions of the last few months have come together to form a convoluted advance fee scam — based on multi million loans with non-existing collateral — on Calvin Ayre:
- Collateral 1: Bitcoins in trust in Panama (doesn’t exist in Panama, Craig Wright admitted during Kleiman v Wright, it should have been Seychelles, but then ATO also had already said in 2016 that no such trust exists anywhere at all, and Court Florida confirmed these findings in 2019, looking at Craig Wright his false declarations and forgeries — forgeries that apparently convinced Calvin Ayre, but not Court Florida). These non-existing bitcoins are being promised to Calvin Ayre for $100 a piece in 2020 (and as we know by now, several years after 2020: they have never been delivered as they don’t exist)
- Collateral 2: $54 million R&D tax rebate funds from AusIndustry (which is a bogus claim pulled from Craig Wright’s ass, only “proven” by fake press release in May 2015)
- Loan: Note that Calvin Ayre raised the initial $2 million already to $8 million. This is the start of a years long money stream that flows in only one direction: from sugar daddy Calvin Ayre to sugar baby and financial black hole Craig Wright.
June 18, 2015: After making false promises about R&D claims and Bitcoin buy prices in 2020 of $100 from his non-existing stash, Craig Wright defrauds Calvin Ayre even further with a fake Bitcoin paper wallet. Let’s check out how that exactly went.
For the bail out in progress, Calvin Ayre requests a collateral. Craig Wright offers to bring in a Bitcoin paper wallet for the “escrow account” that Calvin is suggesting.
The paper wallet that Craig is using is for the Bitcoin address 1Feex. Learn everything about Craig Wright and his false claims around 1Feex in “The Faketoshi Tale of 1Feex”.
Make no mistake, this paper wallet is a clear cut forgery created by Craig Wright.
June 19, 2015: A new email thread is started about the Letter of Intent (called ‘Loi’ here).
We notice again that Craig Wright is trying to lure Calvin Ayre into the bailout with promises of millions to be received from the ATO. Instead of $54 million that we learned about from the fake press release that Craig Wright wrote a few weeks ago in May 2015, it is now $5.4 million (or is this a typo, maybe?). In all cases, within a few days we will learn what the ATO actually wants from Craig.
The last email from the little thread above, also typed up by Craig Wright, is, in hindsight, hilarious. Stefan Matthews will now tell you a completely different lie, that he knew about Craig and ‘his’ Bitcoin invention from 2007 onward. Reality is, it is only around April of this year (2015) that Stefan got involved with Craig Wright’s cosplay. Then there’s a sentence “after 2020, the trust ends and I have unfettered control of the BTC I own ongoing”. At the time of writing it is more than three years later, and Craig Wright still has no “unfettered control” over any BTC. Instead, his Tulip Trust list was signed 145 times in 2020 “Craig Wright is a liar and a fraud”, and other bitcoin that is supposedly in the trust (on the 1Feex and 12ib7 addresses) has now been stolen in an Ocean’s 11 style hack where burglars planted a Pineapple wifi device behind his tv and supposedly ran away with 110,000 BTC. At least, that is what Craig Wright claims. But that’s another (lawsuit) story for another day.
June 22, 2015: The ATO writes to Craig’s Tax Lawyer, Andrew Sommer, declaring the outcome of their audit investigation and, whoops, Craig is now on the hook for a whopping $5.68 million in tax levied against the business including an almost $1.9 million fine for Coin-Exch Pty Ltd.
The 7 page long ‘ATO Completion of audit’ letter is, to make an understatement, a pretty interesting read. It explains in every painful detail the level of ‘reckless’ fraud that Craig Wright had executed with his company Coin-Exch:
“You made a statement to the Commissioner by lodging your activity statement. The statement was false or misleading as it incorrectly stated the assessed net amount. The assessed net amount includes any amount of GST that you have to pay.
MT 2008/1 explains that recklessness is gross carelessness. You act recklessly when your conduct clearly shows disregard of, or indifference to, consequences that are foreseeable by a reasonable person as being a likely result of your actions. We have determined that you are liable to an administrative penalty because you behaved recklessly when you made the statement. This is because the facts show that you should have reasonably foreseen that your actions may have led to a shortfall amount.”
And here, with this rather massive amount to pay without any sights on further tax returns, Craig knew he was cornered and needed an urgent bailout.
Also around this day, June 22, 2015, Craig and Ramona talked with Ira Kleiman. The $54 million fake rebate claim was mentioned too, as Ira Kleiman believed this to be a truthful detail in the false stories that Craig Wright was telling him.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t.
Meanwhile, Business Insider Australia provided a further update on December 9, 2015 about the struggles of Hotwire, the company of Craig that was put under administration in April 2014 to wind down its debts in the years after.
A few quotes from their article “REVEALED: The ATO’s $1.7M penalty on a company owned by the Australian ‘Bitcoin mastermind’”:
“At the centre of the dispute is Hotwire’s 2014 tax return and some $3.4 million claimed as GST tax credits. Hotwire’s tax return also gives rise to a $5.5 million income tax refund, but Business Insider understands this has not been released by the ATO.
The company’s tax return is now being handled by the arm of the ATO which specialises in high net worth individuals.
“The ATO has disputed the validity of the amounts claimed and has levied a penalty on Hotwire of $1,716,608.00 in respect of the lodgement,” the McGrath Nicol administrators write. “We understand that the Directors dispute the position adopted by the ATO.”
After Hotwire went into voluntary administration, its creditors agreed last year to strike a Deed of Company Agreement, a deal to stop the company going into liquidation. Some repayments to creditors have been made, although other expected payments throughout this year have failed to materialise, in part because the expected ATO refund hasn’t shown up.
There is a further Bitcoin-related twist, however: the failure of Hotwire was attributed in May 2014 partly to the disintegration of the Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange, which famously imploded in February of last year with the loss of more than $US450 million worth of Bitcoins.
Hotwire hit problems in April of last year when it failed to receive another expected tax rebate worth millions of dollars, killing its cash flow. McGrath Nicol wrote to creditors in May 2014:
The Directors have attributed the failure of the Company to:
– delays in receiving the $3.1 million GST refund for the September 2013 quarter; and
– Dr Wright, as the major shareholder no longer being able to provide financial accommodation to the Company due to the collapse of the Mount Gox Bitcoin registry where we understand Dr Wright had a significant exposure [Note: an exposure of 14.63 Bitcoin, valued ~$8,050 at the moment of collapse].
In its update to creditors last month, McGrath Nicol wrote: “We note that since the FY14 Tax Return was filed, it has been allocated to the Private Groups & High Wealth Individuals team within the ATO, which has made several detailed requests for additional information.”
Business Insider understands that with the $5.5 million refund not forthcoming to pay the creditors, the money is expected to come from another source, potentially Wright himself.”
Well, no.
June 29, 2015: Craig Wright’s bail out starts taking shape.
Craig, having been feverishly pumping out plenty of ‘astroturf’ implying his ‘Satoshiness’ which, while failing to convince the astute investigators of the ATO, has now managed to reel in a credulous billionaire and his lackeys, is incredibly now being bailed out for almost $15,000,000.
Finally, his ‘Satoshi’ cosplay is going to garner some real cash payout other than fraudulent tax rebates!
A ‘Summary Of Agreed Terms’ is made up, signed by Ramona Watts (DeMorgan), Stefan Matthews (The Sterling Group) and Craig Wright (on behalf of himself).
- $1,500,000 Asset Purchase for IP and technologies DeMorgan et al
- $4,800,000 Services Agreement to set up nChain
- $2,500,000 Convertible Loan, consisting of:
- $1,500,000 for legal costs associated with ATO matters, patent filings
- $1,000,000 for nChain - $3,500,000 Rights and Services Agreement for Craig Wright:
- $1,000,000 initial payment
- $500,000 per year salary for 5 years
- His Life Story Rights
First, note that the foundation is being laid for the hiring of ‘ghost writer’ Andrew O’Hagan later in the year 2015. We’ll get back to that in the September-November era.
Second, note how $1,500,000 is being paid under ‘Asset Purchase’ for Craig Wright’s IP and technologies. Now also note that this IP and technology stack also contains the fraudulently obtained $57,000,000 in IP from the New South Wales Supreme Court claims against W&K Info Defense Research LLC in late 2013 (which turned out to be a “nullity based on sham” according the ATO, but do you think the bail out contract partners, except Craig Wright of course, were aware of these details: probably not)!
Now that we’re at it anyway, what other valuations for Craig’s business dealings popped up in those years? Early 2014, within mere months from the end of the NSWSC claims case aforementioned, but just before they went bankrupt in April that year, Hotwire was ‘valued’ at $276,268,599:
In November 2014, when DeMorgan was starting to take care of the remains of Hotwire, this valuation was upped a notch to $378,475,713 according a report of a company called Business Reports & Values (BRV):
So it appears Stefan Matthews obtained things for pennies on the dollar, buying all this ‘valuable’ IP and technologies from Craig Wright for only $1,500,000. If only Craig Wright was happily accepted as Satoshi Nakamoto by the wider public next, then this would have been the business deal of the century!
Now, having arrived at June 29, 2015, we also start touching the timeline of Arthur van Pelt’s other article “The Craig Wright May 2016 Signing Sessions Debacle, In Full Context” here.
A few quotes from that article go deeper into the Life Story Rights:
“On this day, a contract was signed with Craig Wright, Ramona Watts (Craig’s wife) and Stefan Matthews that contains the following paragraph about “the exclusive rights to Craig’s life story for subsequent publication or release (suggest NewCo retain a researcher and ghost writer [Note: this turned out to be Andrew O’Hagan, author of The Satoshi Affair] to begin background research and preparation, as precautionary measure).”.
It is, of course, also perfectly clear that the financial stakes are high for camp Craig Wright.
“The plan was always clear to the men behind nCrypt. They would bring Wright to London and set up a research and development centre for him, with around thirty staff working under him. They would complete the work on his inventions and patent applications — he appeared to have hundreds of them — and the whole lot would be sold as the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, who would be unmasked as part of the project. Once packaged, Matthews and MacGregor planned to sell the intellectual property for upwards of a billion dollars. MacGregor later told me he was speaking to Google and Uber, as well as to a number of Swiss banks. ‘The plan was to package it all up and sell it,’ Matthews told me. ‘The plan was never to operate it.’” — Andrew O’Hagan (The Satoshi Affair)
July 6, 2015: Craig’s final post on the Cloudcroft blog “CEO Update: The Next 5 Years”.
Craig Wright, happy with the lock in of a few million that will lift the ATO burden from his shoulders for a bit, immediately continues with his supercomputer scam. As he writes:
“Despite issues with the ATO, Cloudcroft Supercomputers and its parent group, DeMorgan Ltd, is happy to announce that things are back in full swing as we have secured funding for the next five years to deliver our innovations and solutions to market.”
“Ok, welcome! It’s been a little bit of a break. We’ve been doing our normal battles and all the rest, and well, this week we are coming back to our normal weekly reviews etc. So, an update is more more than anything else rather than talking technology for this particular blog update. The companies are now fully funded — that will go on for at least 5 years (hopefully a lot longer). Details of that, well one day they will come out. What matters for the moment is our ongoing typical battles with Tax office and other such things are all taken care of — others can worry about them other than me.”
Fully funded… mwoah. That remains to be seen.
July 6, 2015: Craig’s lawyer Andrew Sommer terminates engagement.
Andrew Sommer, who had so far been representing Craig Wright for several years in regards to his tax dealings with the ATO, terminates his engagement with Craig and his companies with immediate effect. Let’s have a look how that exactly went.
It’s best to follow the shocking line of events from the bottom of the following email thread upwards. It starts with an email from ATO to Andrew Sommer on July 3, 2015, explaining their damning findings about a handful of forged emails.
When Andrew Sommer forwards the ATO email to Craig’s wife Ramona Watts the next day, he notes “They have significantly more material than this but they have allowed me to share this material with you as an indicative sample to help you understand my position.”
As we know, and have showcased extensively in this series, “significantly more material” would turn out not to be exactly an understatement.
Without further comment, Ramona then forwards the email thread to Craig.
“This is extremely serious. [..] I have no alternative but to cease acting for DeMorgan Limited and Craig immediately. The letter will be issued on Monday.”
In his email, we see Andrew’s urgent advice to Ramona: “I also believe that this information should be provided to Stefan Matthews and Rob Macgregor as a matter of urgency. In my view, it is appropriate for this to come from you rather than from me.”. Now imagine, how likely is it that Andrew’s urgent advice was followed up by Ramona, when Stefan and Robert had just bailed out the couple for $15 million?
In his letter pictured below, Andrew Sommer gave as reason “integrity of documents”, having been notified by the ATO that many emails presented by Craig and intended to support the supposed legitimacy of his claims, those sent to and received from several ATO employees, were found to be forgeries of all kinds: backdated, never existed at all, or contained after-the-fact edited content. Andrew had more-than-likely come to realise that his client had been lying to both him and the ATO over a prolonged period of time, and had been abusing him for endorsing Craig’s forgeries towards the ATO in the process. The ATO notification was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Craig wouldn’t be Craig, of course, if he didn’t categorically deny this event in later years. As in a Kleiman v Wright deposition on March 18, 2020 he declared:
August 26–28, 2015: Craig talks with Ira again.
And we can see the irritation growing with Ira Kleiman. Ira is getting impatient. Meanwhile Craig Wright keeps claiming that it are the R&D claims and tax returns that are not coming in which are causing the financial troubles. To a certain extent this is true: Craig his Potemkin Village companies were never set up to generate substantial revenues, and they were basically only financed with tax refunds. But since ATO found that these tax refunds were supported with false, deceptive stories and fraudulent bookkeeping, they had halted payments to Craig Wright his companies. And although Ira Kleiman is getting a sense for the false and deceptive stories that Craig Wright is telling, the full picture of Craig’s fraud is not known to him, yet.
September 25, 2015: Craig shows frustration on Amazon.
Craig makes the comment “Always the assumption that SN must be a bloody yank.” on Amazon, in a review of the book Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin by Nathaniel Popper.
It is obvious that Craig was not very amused that his hints and online breadcrumbs were still not really working as intended, outside of his recent score with once-fugitive gambling billionaire Calvin Ayre and co. He needs this Satoshi charade to gain traction, an uninterested public or a skeptical media will not do if he is to milk this new arrangement for all he can. There’s no fool quite like an old fool, but even Calvin will need to be kept believing. Craig has ‘work’ to do. Time for some serious measures, one would think?
September 25, 2015: Craig adjusts the “Bitcoin” blog forgery once more.
And we are treated with the next ‘Satoshi’ breadcrumb of Craig Wright. His failed “Bitcoin” post in which he mistakenly announced Bitcoin Beta to go live on January 11, 2009 (it was factually Bitcoin Alpha on January 3, 2009, as Bitcoin Beta would only be released October 29, 2009 by the real Satoshi Nakamoto, meanwhile the first Bitcoin client could be downloaded on January 9, 2009 already) gets another obfuscation treatment:
“Update, 25 Sept 2015
It does always surprise me how at times the best place to hide it right in the open.”
October 2015: New York Times Finance & Tech journalist Nathaniel Popper receives an unconvincing email…
As Nathaniel mentions, the ‘dox’ email claimed massive bitcoin expenditure by Wright’s companies as supposed proof he was Satoshi but the ATO’s investigation at the time was showing this to be a lie, meaning the ‘dox’ documents were just as fabricated as Craig’s tax rebate claims.
September — November 2015
Around the same time that Craig apparently unleashed his self-dox campaign, another forgery “I mined Bitcoin in the past and write code.” , pops up in the header of Craig’s private blog “Cracked, inSecure and Generally Broken”.
Andrew O’Hahan is being hired. Around end of October 2015 he receives an email from Jimmy Nguyen, as he penned down in his long form The Satoshi Affair:
November 2015: What happened with Tulip Trading’s C01N supercomputer meanwhile?
Referring to the already critical notes made by the ATO found under December 6, 2013 in “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”, we are sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that ATO finally also rejected everything related to this C01N supercomputer.
Look for quotes like:
“Duplicates of serial numbers and UUIDs were observed and the fact that they are also obfuscated, and appear to have been taken from an internet source, makes them unconvincing proof of the existence of the purported C01N supercomputer”
“The specifications for the purported C01N supercomputer provided by Dr Wright to the ATO are not consistent with each other nor with those listed on the Top500 Website. Again this information appears unreliable”
“we conclude that the taxpayer did not have access to the purported supercomputer. Given Dr Wright’s extensive IT qualifications, it is inconceivable that he was unaware of this fact. We therefore conclude the evidence provided to us was manufactured by the taxpayer in an attempt to deceive us”
After entering the supercomputer Top500 list in November 2014 on #64 (see Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2), then in June 2015 the Tulip Trading/C01N system was ranked #15, while in November 2015 it was ranked #17 on the Top500 website. However, most these ‘ranks’ can only be looked up with help of WayBack Machine, as the Top500 website has deleted almost all Craig Wright related supercomputer entries from their website. Computerworld Netherlands explains on June 20, 2016:
“One much-publicized computer you won’t find in the Top500 rankings any more is Tulip Trading’s C01N. Allegedly built by self-styled bitcoin inventor Craig Wright, C01N [Note that this entry is still, confusing many, visible on the top500 website] entered the rankings in 64th place in November 2014, jumping to 15th place in June 2015 following a claimed upgrade.
“When doubts about this system surfaced, we tried to independently verify its existence, but ultimately could not,” Top500 list maintainer Erich Strohmaier said via email.
C01N initially made it into the November 2015 ranking, in 17th place.
“We meant to remove it at that time, but it fell through the cracks for a while. It should get removed from all lists, but older lists get much less attention (and care) than the newest,” Strohmaier wrote. C01N was removed from the November 2015 rankings some time in May [2016], cached copies of the list show, with machines below it all moving up a rank.”
And Craig Wright? He still pretends a nose bleed when asked about the supercomputers in April 2019, and at the same time he conveniently forgets about the Sukuriputo Okane supercomputer that also failed to get approval from the ATO, as it didn’t exist either…
“Q: When did you have a supercomputer?
A: Back in 2013. Sorry, end of 2012, but it was not working. 2013, 2014, 2015.
Q: What was it called?
A: Tulip and C01N. There were two.
Q: So, you did have a supercomputer called C01N?
A: That is what I just said.
Q: When did you get rid of these supercomputers?
A: I did not.
Q: You still have them?
A: I do not have them.
Q: Who has them?
A: I do not know.
Q: What happened to them at the end of 2015?
A: I do not know.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright (deposition April 4, 2019)
November 2, 2015: Craig Wright is being ignored on Twitter.
Craig’s Twitter account before he used “ProfFaustus” as his handle was “Dr_Craig_Wright”. Here seen in a hilarious, desperate attempt to reach out to Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream (a well known Bitcoin infrastructure company) and mentioned by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper in the ‘References’ section with his paper “Hashcash — a denial of service counter-measure”, dated 2002, as inspiration for the mere existence of Bitcoin.
Adam, however, largely ignored Craig’s repeated attempts to draw him into responding to these tweets as, according to later recollection, he’d already dismissed him due to the persistently incoherent nonsense Craig had previously spouted about Bitcoin-related subjects in other discussion threads.
You can see how Craig is boasting about the claimed performance of a supercomputer which was ultimately proven to not even exist. Clearly, he still wants to try and show the ATO, and his gullible new investor bailing him out for $15,000,000 (USD), that he is a respected peer within the Bitcoin intelligentsia. Someone who might, indeed, be Satoshi.
He was, and is, neither.
November 12, 2015: Media start receiving Craig’s dox package.
Leah Goodman of Newsweek, who unsuccessfully ‘revealed’ Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi Nakamoto in March 2014, is one of the first to receive the package of information that is supposed to prove that Craig Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin. On December 10, 2015 (just after the publication of the Wired and Gizmodo articles) she tweeted the screenshot that will be shown in a bit.
But is it a coincidence that the email appears to be written by Craig Wright himself, AND the fact that on this same day the further foundations were laid for the May 2016 signing sessions debacle? Andrew O’Hagan describes this day in “The Satoshi Affair” as follows:
“On Thursday, 12 November [2015], I turned up at MacGregor’s office near Oxford Circus, where I signed in under a pseudonym and made my way to a boardroom wallpapered with mathematical formulae. MacGregor came into the room wearing a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him — the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio — and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the whole exercise he said it was simple: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some zeroes.’
MacGregor described Wright to me as ‘the goose that lays the golden egg’. He said that if I agreed to take part I would have exclusive access to the whole story, and to everyone around Wright, and that it would all end with Wright proving he was Satoshi by using cryptographic keys that only Satoshi had access to, those associated with the very first blocks in the blockchain. MacGregor told me this might happen at a public TED talk. He said it would be ‘game over’. Wright’s patents would then be sold and Wright could get on with his life, out of the public eye. ‘All he wants is peace to get on with his work,’ MacGregor told me at that first meeting. ‘And how this ends, for me, is with Craig working for, say, Google, with a research staff of four hundred.’”
Did this meeting between Andrew and Robert trigger Craig, who knew he can’t sign anything Bitcoin related, to ramp up his efforts to be ‘revealed’ as Satoshi Nakamoto earlier so he wouldn’t have to go through with the signing sessions? Or is it a stretch to suggest that he was also very desperate to ‘prove’ to the ATO that he was in fact the creator of Bitcoin?
One can certainly try to make educated guesses about Craig’s motivations around this day, but there is hardly any doubt that the only person initially benefitting mostly of the Satoshi dox, is Craig himself. Only when the dox package was publicly exposed as a treasure box of conflicting information and backdated forgeries, Craig desperately started to try find all kinds of lame excuses about hacking ex-staff, the Anonymous group hacking him since 2011, Blockstream employees hacking him, and at some point in 2021 (November 4) he even suggested that Ira Kleiman (the brother of late Dave Kleiman, who started a fraud lawsuit against Craig Wright in February 2018) was behind the hacking of his computer network, the altering of his documents and subsequent doxing of his ‘Satoshiness’ to Wired/Gizmodo!
The “It is in evidence.” that Craig Wright refers to here is actually not Ira Kleiman having contact with Wired and Gizmodo on December 4, 2015 (which never happened as far as we know), but only with Andy Cush of Gawker magazine on that same day. And even if Ira Kleiman had contact with Wired and Gizmodo on that same day, it is extremely unlikely that his message was opposite to what he told Gawker — another recipient of Craig’s self-dox package!
“At the moment I just don’t see much of an upside for participating in your story aside from satisfying my own curiousity about the information you have on my brother.”
Next to the authors of this series, out there are others who also don’t take Craig’s “the dog ate my homework” stories for granted. One of them is Twitter member “a void (leaks)” — worthy of a follow for who’s on Twitter — who regularly provides high quality updates and comments on the Craig “Faketoshi” Wright saga.
To add, also online magazine Splinter worded it well already in December 2015 in their article “Who is the hacker that outed Craig Wright as the creator of Bitcoin? Maybe Craig Wright himself.”
“So let’s recap: in September 2015, Wright was annoyed that people didn’t know who the real Nakamoto was. In October 2015, the journalist of the book he complained about gets a tip that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Popper ignored the tip, saying he wasn’t convinced, in part because Wright’s LinkedIn profile says he worked with the NSA.
After a tipster gets ignored by the New York Times, in November 2015, both Gizmodo and a security researcher associated with Wired receive tips, too, from an anonymous person again insisting that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.
This timeline of events makes it seem as though Craig Wright himself may be the anonymous tipster, having decided it was time to out himself as Bitcoin’s creator — if he indeed is. The danger in accepting tips from anonymous people is that it makes it harder to know what their real motivation might be. There are obvious incentives for an entrepreneur active in the blockchain and security space to be known as the talented developer behind Bitcoin. Since the stories came out, people have pointed to evidence that this may be an elaborately staged prank.”
Anyways. As Leah McGrath Goodman said, in reply to Nathaniel Popper’s December tweet about having received the ‘dox’ package (below) in October, “We all got it. It was being shopped around fairly aggressively this autumn.”
November 19, 2015: Patrick Paige contacts Craig Wright about “a reporter”.
It appears that reporters are starting to inquire about the dox package. But this email from Patrick Paige (Dave Kleiman’s training officer in the army, with who he later started Computer Forensics LLC) is interesting for another tidbit also: Craig claims that Dave Kleiman helped him set up the first supercomputer. You know, that NONEXISTENT supercomputer.
November 27, 2015: Craig accuses the ATO of doctoring emails.
It appears that after his tax lawyer, Andrew Sommer, had promptly terminated his engagement with Craig and his companies, following the revelation about the faked ‘evidence’ used to support his version of events, Craig tried to strike back at the ATO about the email forgeries that they discovered, and to obfuscate the fact that the person who had been massively doctoring and forging so far, was Craig himself.
The reader might remember we discussed a few bits and pieces in “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1” of a Craig Wright puff piece from Murray Distributed Technologies called “Forensic Report Raises Questions about Australian Tax Office’s Handling of Craig Wright Probe”. What we did not properly address yet, was their section that starts with:
“We have exclusively obtained two Computer Forensics Reports performed on behalf of Wright’s company Demorgan Ltd where computer forensics expert Dr. Nick Sharples and digital forensics expert Alan Batey were independently appointed to examine email messages used in the ATO’s probe of Wright. These emails were used as evidence in the continuing audits and probes of Wright’s business dealings that culminated in the ATO raid on his Australian residence in December 2015, one day after Wired published an article accusing him of being one of the people behind the Satoshi Nakamoto team.”
What Murray Distributed Technologies didn’t realize, and of course weren’t told either by their exclusive source (it’s probably not overly speculative to think that Craig Wright himself was this ‘exclusive’ source), was that the ATO had already thoroughly debunked these reports of Sharples and Batey, which they apparently received on November 27, 2015, as described in their ATO’s Reasons for Decision for C01n Pty Ltd report, issued early 2016.
Every single point above thoroughly exposes a litany of Craig’s fakes, forgeries and frauds, if you scanned past it, do please go back and give it a proper read, it is legitimately fascinating to see how the ATO experts dismantle his lies again and again.
But, below, is the final nail in his ‘Sharples and Batey’ distraction:
The coup de grâce delivered so exquisitely by the ATO investigators above, was that the very emails Craig had provided Sharples and Batey with, in order to have them analysed to supposedly prove the ATO had doctored their evidence… had either not originated from the ATO in the first place, or were altered versions of legitimate ATO emails!
To put it in soccer parlance, Craig’s sham ‘investigation’ had scored ‘an own goal’!
November 29/30, 2015: Craig Wright makes an appearance on an All-Star Panel of Bitcoin OGs (to a perplexed audience).
It is at this point that ‘Bitcoin Belle’ has decided to crowbar an appearance by Craig, albeit via Skype, on a panel of well-known Bitcoin personalities for a Las Vegas conference, apparently believing that his personality, intellect and expertise on the subject will shine through and show him to be the very embodiment of a potential ‘Satoshi’ candidate.
It does not.
From the outset to 00:02:46 we see the cringe-worthy way in which Bitcoin Belle (Michelle Seven) desperately tries to coax something coherently-Bitcoin-related out of Craig to explain to the audience why he is even included in this event. He seems to think that mumbling something hand-wavy about his myriad academic credentials and ‘research no-one ever hears about’, will suffice. Michelle ends up having to actually interrupt his vapid spiel to ask him to say who he is as nobody at the conference knows him and even prompts with, “are you a computer scientists, are you a miner?”, to which he entirely misses the mark by replying, “I’m a bit of everything, I have a masters in law…I have a master in statistics…a couple of doctorates…” before finally being explicitly asked to say how he first learned of Bitcoin, leading him to, again, respond with more vague allusion about how he has “been involved in this for a long time…I try and stay…I keep my head down”, leading Michelle to finally ask him directly, “were you a miner?”, to which he just responds after an extended pause, “a long time ago”.
It is obvious that Craig is desperately wanting to avoid having to overtly imply that he is claiming to be ‘Satoshi’ in front of both an OG panel and an educated audience containing actual experts in the Bitcoin field, who could possibly lead to him being exposed as the fraud he is should he be challenged on such a topic. But he has time yet, so far he just wants to be included for the benefit of his doubters, the ATO, and his backers, Calvin Ayre and co.
At 00:33:20 he’s back to waffling about doing ‘computing’ in Iceland, on his (NONEXISTENT, remember?) supercomputer called ‘Tulip’ before launching into a tedious tale about the history of Tulips and the associated ‘Tulip Bubble’ which he asserts was a ‘swaption not a bubble’, before finally claiming at 00:35:35 that the ‘computing’ in Iceland, on his (NONEXISTENT, remember?) supercomputer called ‘Tulip’, is all about Bitcoin ‘scalability’. Craig even goes as far as to shamelessly mentioning that his (NONEXISTENT, remember?) supercomputer was “№15 in the top 500 supercomputers globally.”
Now let this sink in for a moment. Craig Wright doesn’t have a supercomputer, but is there on a fifteen-foot video screen, talking over Skype about all the Bitcoin-related work he is doing, in Iceland, on a supercomputer that only existed in his dreams… and on forged invoices paid with nonexistent Bitcoin to advance a multi-million tax scam in Australia.
A nonexistent supercomputer, by the way, which was only called ‘Tulip Trading’ because that was simply the name of the ready-made ‘shelf company’ Craig bought from the Seychelles formation agent previously, that he claimed to the ATO acts as a Trust for a vast wealth in equally-NONEXISTENT bitcoins, you know, for his blatant multi-million-dollar tax fraud their investigators keep exposing!
In any event, this attempted introduction of Craig Wright to the wider Bitcoin community can only be marked as being a total dud. He failed to capture anyone’s interest and merely ended up providing some amusement to Nick Szabo part-way through with a stubborn and willfully erroneous insistence that Bitcoin is ‘Turing complete’.
Now who knew that Nick Szabo has a daughter? On February 4, 2024 Kara Szabo shared a story about her earliest memory of Craig Wright on Twitter.
“In 2015, I encountered Craig Wright for the first time on a screen in Las Vegas during a Bitcoin conference I attended after traveling from MIT, where I was a student. The conference had been organized by a weird redhead named Michele Seven, who was a Bitcoin groupie and a strong supporter of Ross Ulbricht. Expressing my belief that Ulbricht deserved imprisonment was highly unpopular among the community.
During that time, one of my mentors was Michael Sipser, an authoritative figure in the field of theoretical computer science who literally wrote the book on the subject. Given my interest in theoretical computer science and my study of Bitcoin since its inception, I quickly recognized Craig Wright as a sciolistic imbecile.
I didn’t pay much attention to his connection with Michele or how he had managed to join the conference panel. The Bitcoin community was filled with self-proclaimed experts who uttered nonsense. However, a few months later, Wired and Gizmodo were deceived into falsely identifying Craig as Satoshi Nakamoto. This marked the commencement of an obvious hoax that should have been debunked from the start.
Now, more than nine years have passed, and this absurdity has been perpetuated for far too long due to a combination of human gullibility and inefficiencies of law. Michele Seven is a figure whose name is rarely brought up, yet she seemed to have been involved in facilitating this hoax.
It is important to clarify that Craig Wright had no involvement in the development of Bitcoin between 2007 and 2015. He is not Satoshi Nakamoto, and he never will be, except in the minds of those with intellectual deficiencies.”
December 8, 2015: Wired and Gizmodo articles, suggesting Craig Wright might be Satoshi Nakamoto.
With the ‘dox’ email package having been sent around to multiple journalists and news outlets in the preceding months — most recipients being wholly unimpressed and unconvinced by the effort — two outlets are intrigued enough to look deeper into their contents and engage with some of the people cited within to fact-check what is claimed.
Calls and emails to professionals who feature in transcripts of the many ATO meetings are, understandably, answered in the affirmative. Yes, these meetings took place and, yes, the contents are an accurate representation of what was discussed.
What is not understood by the Wired and Gizmodo journalists at the time is that of course these specific events are true! Craig *did* have meetings with the ATO where Bitcoin was frequently discussed. As did his tax lawyers who explicitly spoke about his supposed extensive trove of bitcoin from having mined coins since 2009 because, as we have already clarified for you in Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2, these were statements made by respected professionals ENTIRELY-PREMISED on what Craig had told them verbally and which he’d evidenced through a litany of fraudulent filings and faked backdated contracts and emails. Andrew Sommer spoke on record to the ATO in a meeting held in 2014 about Craig having ‘commenced mining in 2009’ but there still remains, to this day, no evidence to suggest this is even remotely true.
The ‘dox’ package contained an extensive collection of official 2013/2014 ATO transcripts and correspondence BECAUSE he was being investigated by them after having claimed record-setting GST and R&D cash rebates on the strength of supposed massive bitcoin-based business payments and receipts he could provide no legitimate evidence for so, OF COURSE there was plenty of discussion about Craig Wright and Bitcoin, they were on to the fact it was all a fraudulent scam by that point!
Alongside the fact-checking the journalists had conducted with key figures, there were what appeared to be an extensive collection of contracts, emails and electronic signatures directly linking Craig Wright to Satoshi Nakamoto, it was just too tempting to hold off for much longer on breaking their scoop.
Wired and Gizmodo had both heard of each other’s intention to publish their findings outing Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto, apparently prompting both to rush to get the lead on the other and possibly explaining their failure to fully vet the ‘evidence’ sufficiently. The results were all-too predictable.
First out of the gate was Wired, followed a few hours later by Gizmodo, with both breathlessly citing the ‘compelling and perplexing’ new evidence which they claimed had been corroborated through interviews.
This would have been everything Craig Wright could have hoped for at this point. Both the disbelieving ATO investigators and his deep-pocketed new financial backer would see the world forced to acknowledge his rightful claim to the Bitcoin ‘throne’. His tax problems would be behind him and a bright future staking claim to the huge ‘Satoshi Stash’ lay ahead.
Craig Steven Wright and Dave Kleiman were named as the men involved in the very development of Bitcoin — Yes, Satoshi had been unmasked!
Cue our wry narrator, please.
Narrator: No, Satoshi had not been unmasked.
A rightly-skeptical response from the wider Bitcoin community debunking these exposés was as damning as it was swift.
Outside of the actually-legitimate-but-out-of-context ATO transcripts, myriad emails, pgp keys, domains and documents, which were supposed to directly link Craig Wright to both Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto, were publicly proven to be faked and often poorly-executed fakes at that. Both outlets had fallen for the apparent volume of evidence, rather than its quality.
The derision came thick and fast.
Due to the backlash to the articles, exposing that both Wired and Gizmodo had not done appropriate indepth due diligence on the material they received, they quickly started to backtrack on their suggestions that Craig Wright might be the inventor of Bitcoin together with his deceased partner Dave Kleiman. Several follow up articles were published, and Wired, for example, not only updated their article within days, to detail the flawed evidence, but added an additional Editor’s Note in 2019 explaining that Craig’s own public attempts to prove himself as Satoshi had likewise been exposed as faked, too.
“EDITOR’S NOTE, 4/30/2019: In the days following publication of this story, WIRED published an update that identified inconsistencies in the evidence supporting the notion that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright later came forward to claim that he was indeed the creator of Bitcoin, but offered some evidence that appeared to be fraudulent. This piece has been updated to clarify Wright’s claims, and the headline has been changed to make clear that WIRED no longer believes Wright is likely to be the creator of Bitcoin.”
And Gizmodo retracted in a follow up publication “The Mystery of Craig Wright and Bitcoin Isn’t Solved Yet”:
“And several outlets have done even more digging to try and figure out whether Wright and Kleiman were, in fact, closely involved in creating Bitcoin.
Some of those pieces have been excellent. Several of them revealed valuable information about Wright in particular that merits close examination. Few, if any, acknowledge that outside of the document dump, Craig Wright has been telling people for over a year that he was involved in creating Bitcoin. None have proved anything conclusive about whether he was telling the truth. Below, briefly, is the collected evidence that he wasn’t:
- We now know, thanks to Sarah Jeong at Motherboard, that a set of PGP keys (referenced in the apparent draft of a trust agreement wherein Wright hands off 1.1 million bitcoin to Kleiman) seem to be backdated — created after 2008 and then modified to give the appearance of an earlier origin date.
- In a similar vein, several reporters have uncovered evidence that Wright was drafting something of a digital revisionist history: he appears to have modified blog posts and social media accounts to insert references to Bitcoin where none had previously existed.
- A sharp-eyed reader also noted to Gizmodo that according to registration information, a domain shown in one of Wright’s apparent emails to Kleiman was created months after March 2008, the date on the message, which could indicate a forgery. (The URL — “information-defense.com” — appears on a list of domains pending expiration in May 2008, pointing to the likelihood that its registration lapsed and was later renewed, which would explain the discrepancy.)
- Charles Sturt University, where Wright claimed on his LinkedIn account to have obtained a PhD, said in a statement that he received two Master’s degrees but not a doctorate. And the existence of two supercomputers that Wright’s company, Cloudcroft, claimed to own, is under question.
- Finally, two days after the articles were published, an email appearing to originate from a known Satoshi account was posted to the bitcoin-dev mailing list. “I am not Craig Wright,” it read. “We are all Satoshi.” But as the Guardian and others have pointed out, the likelihood that that email was forged is not small.”
Now let irony have it that “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1” mentioned the media outlet The Conversation, where Craig Wright happily posted 5 articles and 112 comments (in which he casually mentioned Bitcoin a few times) in 2011, and now in Part 3 we see an entry of The Conversation again.
As they wrote on December 9, 2015 in response to the Wired and Gizmodo articles that were published the day before: “Have journalists found the inventor of Bitcoin or simply been duped?”. What follows is an analysis of Craig’s behavior in 2011 on their platform:
“We actually have specific evidence that Craig Wright is very unlikely to be Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2011, Wright wrote several articles for The Conversation. They were all around the area of cybersecurity but Wright was also a prolific commenter on both his own and others’ articles. The comments are largely spoken with a voice of authority and are largely combative in nature. In 112 comments, Wright mentions Bitcoin only once, at the end of a very long list of financial alternatives to PayPal. He said:
For someone who allegedly invented Bitcoin, he was unable to spell the currency correctly. He didn’t even name it as the first alternative to PayPal. He suggested Google Checkout as the most likely digital payment system to replace PayPal’s dominance in the electronic payment space.”
Not only do we see Craig Wright being very ignorant about Bitcoin here, we also find, again, another important clue about Craig’s background: “They were all around the area of cybersecurity”. Although Craig desperately tried to rewrite history in later years by backdating his involvement with coding, cryptography, payment systems and decentralized peer-to-peer networks, fact is: Craig’s sole expertise till his Bitcoin rich list addresses fraud started in the second half of 2013, quickly followed by a — first careful late 2013: “I’m an early Bitcoin miner”, later more obvious — Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay starting early 2014, was in the relatively unrelated fields of Information Technology and Cybersecurity.
As Gizmodo went on to say, “Craig Wright acts in the manner of someone who either believes that he invented Bitcoin or badly wants someone else to believe it, and he’s been acting that way for a long time.”
In that you’ve seen the objective evidence the ATO uncovered, detailing Craig’s endless trail of lies and forgeries throughout his multi-million-dollar cash rebate fraud, you know full well who the ‘someone’ is that he’s been trying to convince from the very start of his Satoshi cosplay.
With the sheen rapidly fading from his crown, following the revelations that it’s all a con-job, the pretender-to-the-throne is seeing his glorious coronation being roundly mocked and ridiculed within hours of the articles and the ‘evidence’ being posted.
Seeing a growing wave of online sleuths eager to dig up his past and possibly reveal even more about his Potemkin-village charade of ‘front’ companies forming the basis for his rebate fraud, he takes action to conceal what he can.
December 9, 2015: Craig Wright scrubs all online presence.
From YouTube to personal blogs, from business websites (see DeMorgan Ltd example below) to LinkedIn and Twitter, nothing survives Craig’s digital sledgehammer.
At some point, while Craig was rushed to London, even Stefan Matthews helped deleting everything Craig Wright on the internet:
“When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him up. They went to Stefan’s apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes while he set up his laptops on the dining-room table. They spent the rest of Saturday wiping his remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any contact to be possible: he wanted to cut Wright off from the world.” — Andrew O’Hagan “The Satoshi Affair”
Despite their desperate attempts, most, if not all, of Craig Wright’s online presence is still findable with WayBack Machine, Archive Today or likewise online outlets that store the history of the internet.
This is a good moment to summarize all the companies that we currently know Craig possessed in this timeframe (there might be a few more we don’t know about yet, though), and how they went along in the upcoming years. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that all the companies in the screenshot above — mostly empty paper-only vehicles to advance Craig’s Australian tax fraud — do not exist anymore. In fact, NONE of the 22 companies listed here exist anymore!
- Information Defense (incorporated 2009, dismantled 2017)
- Integyrs (incorporated 2009, dismantled 2015)
- Not to be confused with Integyrz - Greyfog (incorporated 2009, dismantled 2014)
- Cloudcroft (incorporated 2011, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Panopticrypt (incorporated 2011, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Strasan (incorporated 2011, renamed to C01n in 2014, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Coin-Exch (incorporated 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence (incorporated 2013, bankrupt 2014, dismantled 2017)
- Integyrz (incorporated 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Interconnected Research (incorporated 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Pholus (incorporated 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Denariuz (incorporated 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Zuhl (incorporated 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Hotwire PE Employee Share Plan (incorporated 2013, dismantled 2018)
- Chaos And Nonlinear Forecastability In Economics And Finance (incorporated 2014, dismantled 2018)
- Daso (incorporated 2014, dismantled 2017)
- DeMorgan Holdings (incorporated 2014, dismantled 2017)
- DeMorgan Ltd (incorporated 2014, dismantled 2017)
- Misfits Games (incorporated 2014, dismantled 2018)
- Ezas (incorporated 2014, dismantled 2019)
- Denariuz Ltd (UK) (incorporated as empty shelf company in 2012 by CFS, obtained as such by Craig under the name “Permanent Success” who immediately renamed to Denariuz Ltd in 2014, dismantled 2017)
- C01n Ltd (UK) (incorporated as empty shelf company in 2012 by CFS, obtained as such by Craig under the name “Moving Forward In Business” who immediately renamed to C01n Ltd in 2014, dismantled 2017)
On purpose, the two ‘famous’ Seychelles companies (Tulip Trading Ltd & Wright International Investments Ltd) that Craig Wright still owns are not in this list. As far as we know, these two companies still exist, have not been dissolved from the Seychelles company registries, and — by means of backdated forgeries, fraudulent bookkeeping and non-existing encrypted files between its assets(*) — still form the current installment of the infamous Tulip Trust with which Craig Wright is still annoyingly scamming the Bitcoin industry.
(*) as determined by the ATO during their very thorough tax fraud inquiry as we know by now, furthermore as determined by Court Florida in 2019 during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.
December 9, 2015: the ATO raid on Craig’s house and offices.
The ATO are making their move and have sent agents and law enforcement to arrest Craig and seize evidence related to their multi-year investigation into his fraudulent tax rebate scam. An ill-informed media will spin it as ‘Satoshi’ being hounded following his being ‘outed’ in the two articles, but that is not why they are looking for Craig Steven Wright.
As would be clarified in a ‘The Weekend Australian’ piece, January 20, 2016, the ATO, “firmly believe Craig Wright is not [Satoshi Nakamoto] the creator of Bitcoin, and that he may have created the hoax to distract from his tax issues”.
Meanwhile, Andrew O’Hagan would go on to describe the day of the ATO raids as being something more akin to a spy-chase scene from a fictional thriller, in his long form article The Satoshi Affair.
“Ten men raided a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office. Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of companies associated with cryptocurrency and online security. As one set of agents scoured his kitchen cupboards and emptied out his garage, another entered his main company headquarters at 32 Delhi Road in North Ryde. They were looking for ‘originals or copies’ of material held on hard drives and computers; they wanted bank statements, mobile phone records, research papers and photographs. The warrant listed dozens of companies whose papers were to be scrutinised, and 32 individuals, some with alternative names, or alternative spellings. The name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ appeared sixth from the bottom of the list.
Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird — to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ — and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his ‘toys’, but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed, had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were calling ‘the deal’. Stefan immediately moved Wright and his wife into a luxury apartment at the Meriton World Tower in Sydney. They’d soon be moving to England anyway, and all parties agreed it was best to hide out for now.
At 32 Delhi Road, the palm trees were throwing summer shade onto the concrete walkways — ‘Tailor Made Office Solutions’, it said on a nearby billboard — and people were drinking coffee in Deli 32 on the ground floor. Wright’s office on level five was painted red, and looked down on the Macquarie Park Cemetery, known as a place of calm for the living as much as the dead. No one was sure what to do when the police entered. The staff were gathered in the middle of the room and told by the officers not to go near their computers or use their phones. ‘I tried to intervene,’ one senior staff member, a Dane called Allan Pedersen, remarked later, ‘and said we would have to call our lawyers.’
Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters were sniffing at a strange story — a story too complicated for her to explain — so she just told everyone that damp in the Gordon house had forced them to move out. The place they moved into, a tall apartment building, was right in the city and Wright felt as if he was on holiday. On 9 December, after their first night in the new apartment, Wright woke up to the news that two articles, one on the technology site Gizmodo, the other in the tech magazine Wired, had come out overnight fingering him as the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2008 published a white paper describing a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ — a technology Satoshi went on to develop as bitcoin. Reading the articles on his laptop, Wright knew his old life was over.
By this point, cameras and reporters were outside his former home and his office. They had long heard rumours, but the Gizmodo and Wired stories had sent the Australian media into a frenzy. It wasn’t clear why the police and the articles had appeared on the same day. At about five that same afternoon, a receptionist called from the lobby of Wright’s apartment building to say that the police had arrived. Ramona turned to Wright and told him to get the hell out. He looked at a desk in front of the window: there were two large laptop computers on it — they weighed a few kilos each, with 64 gigabytes of RAM — and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there were office suites and a swimming pool. He stood frozen for a minute before he realised he’d rushed out without his passport.
Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went to his workplace and took his phone, telling him she couldn’t explain because she didn’t want to get him involved.
Meanwhile, Wright was still standing beside the swimming pool in his suit, with a laptop in his arms. He heard people coming up the stairs, sped down the corridor and ducked into the gents. A bunch of teenagers were standing around but seemed not to notice him. He went to the furthest cubicle and deliberately kept the door unlocked. (He figured the police would just look for an engaged sign.) He was standing on top of the toilet when he heard the officers come in. They asked the youngsters what they were doing, but they said ‘nothing’ and the police left. Wright stayed in the cubicle for a few minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone. She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He went down sixty flights of stairs to the car park in the basement, unlocked his car and opened the boot, where he lifted out the spare wheel and put his laptop in the wheel cavity. He drove towards the Harbour Bridge and got lost in the traffic.
As Ramona drove along she began texting the mysterious Stefan, who was at Sydney Airport, having already checked in for a flight to Manila, where he lived. Stefan had to make a fuss to get his bag removed from the plane and then he spoke to Ramona, telling her that Wright would have to get out of the country. She didn’t argue. She called the Flight Centre and asked what flights were leaving. ‘To where?’ asked the saleswoman.
‘Anywhere,’ Ramona said. Within ten minutes she had booked her husband on a flight to Auckland.
In the early evening, Wright, scared and lost, made his way to Chatswood. He texted Ramona to come and meet him, and she immediately texted back saying he should go straight to the airport. She’d booked him a flight. ‘But I don’t have my passport,’ he said. Ramona was afraid she’d be arrested if she returned to their apartment, but her friend said he’d go into the building and get the passport. They waited until the police left the building, then he went upstairs. A few minutes later he came back with the passport, along with the other computer and a power supply.
They met Wright in the airport car park. Ramona had never seen him so worried. ‘I was shocked,’ he later said. ‘I hadn’t expected to be outed like that in the media, and then to be chased down by the police. Normally, I’d be prepared. I’d have a bag packed.’ As Ramona gave him the one-way ticket to Auckland, she was anxious about when she would see him again. Wright said New Zealand was a bit too close and wondered what to do about money. Ramona went to an ATM and gave him $600. He bought a yellow bag from the airport shop in which to store his computers. He had no clothes. ‘It was awful saying goodbye to him,’ Ramona said.
In the queue for security, he felt nervous about his computers. His flight was about to close when the security staff flagged him down. He was being taken to an interview room when an Indian man behind him started going berserk. It was just after the Paris bombings; the man’s wife was wearing a sari and the security staff wanted to pat her down. The man objected. All the security staff ran over to deal with the situation and told Wright to go. He couldn’t believe his luck. He put his head down and scurried through the lounge.
Back at Wright’s office, Allan Pedersen was being interviewed by the police. He overheard one of them ask: ‘Have we got Wright yet?’
‘He’s just hopped a flight to New Zealand,’ his colleague said.
Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the storyline strangely comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone.
At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the airport’s wifi to Skype with Stefan, using a new account. They had a discussion about how to get him to Manila. There was a big rock concert that night in Auckland, and all the hotels were full, but he crossed town in a cab and managed to get a small room at the Hilton. He booked two nights, using cash. He knew how to get more cash out of ATMs than the daily limit, so he worked several machines near the hotel, withdrawing $5000. He ordered room service that night and the next morning went to the Billabong store in Queen Street to buy some clothes. He felt agitated, out of his element: normally he would wear a suit and tie — he enjoys the notion that he is too well dressed to be a geek — but he bought a T-shirt, a pair of jeans and some socks. On the way back to the hotel he got a bunch of SIM cards, so that his calls wouldn’t be monitored. Back at the Hilton he was packing up his computers when the dependable Stefan came on Skype. He told Wright to go to the airport and pick up a ticket he’d left him for a flight to Manila. His picture was all over the papers, along with the story that he was trying to escape.
Within hours of Wright’s name appearing in the press, anonymous messages threatened to reveal his ‘actual history’. Some said he had been on Ashley Madison, the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been seen on Grindr, the gay hook-up app. During a six-hour layover in Hong Kong, he killed his email accounts and tried to wipe his social media profile, which he knew would be heavy with information he wasn’t keen to publicise: ‘Mainly rants,’ he said later. When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him up. They went to Stefan’s apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes while he set up his laptops on the dining-room table. They spent the rest of Saturday wiping his remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any contact to be possible: he wanted to cut Wright off from the world. The next day he put him on a plane to London.” — Andrew O’Hagan “The Satoshi Affair”
Exciting stuff, indeed! Satoshi being outed and having to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid being captured and interrogated, possibly even extradited to unfriendly jurisdictions and charged with drug and terrorism offences over the claimed illicit use of his revolutionary invention, Bitcoin…the movie rights alone would surely be snapped up in an instant by Hollywood!
Except, no, there wasn’t a single person in a position of legal authority who genuinely thought Craig was Satoshi Nakamoto. The whole edge-of-the-seat retelling of his frantic ‘escape from Oz’ is laughable upon reflection for its whole cloak-and-dagger tale of Craig hiding in toilets and getting lost in his rental car and his wife dinging hers into the car park barrier.
Oh, he was fleeing alright, and it was pretty hectic, albeit less ‘Mission Impossible’ and more ‘Mr Bean’.
His reason for evading the authorities, however, is far less glamorous than the spy-thriller-esque narrative suggested by Andrew O’Hagan.
Outtro
Craig now would have you believe that he fled Australia because of him being unfairly persecuted by the ATO, that they were hounding him because he is Satoshi.
The truth is that the ATO raided his home and offices for the very fact that they knew he was not Satoshi. In that their evidence had already shown that he was lying about being Satoshi, this meant the claimed source of his hundreds-of-millions-dollars in business transactions, predicated on his ownership of the ‘Satoshi Stash’, was a lie, too.
These aren’t small matters of a ‘disagreement’ with the tax authorities or, as Craig repeatedly has claimed in the years since, that they were solely concerned with imposing an unfair tax burden on his bitcoin holdings. No, these are extremely serious offences involving defrauding the coffers of the Australian tax-payer and having money paid to his own businesses in fraudulent GST and R&D rebates, again and again, for ever-larger amounts, running into tens of millions of dollars.
Craig would have you believe that he has ‘settled’ this matter, that he paid the various penalties, fines and judgements imposed following the ATO’s audits and investigations.
This isn’t true, either.
There is no ‘settling’ of criminal fraud of this scale outside of a served prison sentence. This isn’t hyperbole, this is already-set precedent in the Australian legal system.
And please make no mistake, these ATO inquiries can last over a decade. In 2018, “Former Perth financier Gary Parsons jailed after half a million dollar ATO rebates” was only brought to justice after an investigation of no less than 11 years.
“A former Perth financier who ripped off more than half a million dollars from the Australian Taxation Office by lodging false GST rebate applications has been jailed for five years.
Gary Andrew Parsons, 53, was extradited to Perth from the US in January last year after an 11-year investigation by the Australian Federal Police and the ATO.”
So, as you can see, the old adage is very true, “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine” and Gary Parsons was found guilty of a mere fraction of what Craig Steven Wright is potentially facing being prosecuted for.
Criminally prosecuted?
Ah, yes. ATO released several reports:
- ATO report 1 (Reasons for decision Coin-Exch & related entities July 2013/September 2013 tax quarter — unknown release date)
- ATO report 2 (starting page 35) (Reasons for decision Craig Wright R&D & related entities July 2013/September 2013 tax quarter — unknown release date)
- ATO report 3 (Reasons for decision C01n 2012/2013 tax year — released March 11, 2016)
- ATO report 4 (starting page 2) (Penalty and interest position paper C01n 2012/2013 tax year — released March 11, 2016)
- ATO report 5 (Reasons for decision Integyrz 2013/2014 tax year — released March 21, 2016)
- ATO report 6 (Reasons for Decision Zuhl 2013/2014 tax year — released April 12, 2016)
And then ramped up to a criminal investigation. Meet Melanie Johnston, one of the ATO’s Criminal Investigators. In June 2018 she contacted Vel Freedman and Kyle Roche, senior members of Ira Kleiman’s counsel in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, and announced she was “conducting a criminal investigation relating to Craig Steven WRIGHT.” for which she requested to speak with Mr [Ira] Kleiman.
To summarize, Craig Wright is facing serious legal jeopardy, as he always has been since the very first cash rebates were filed back in 2009 so he could claim to have sold ‘valuable’ Intellectual Property to his own businesses, all the way through to his doubling and tripling and 100X’ing-down on the scale of his rebate claims once he discovered he could simply claim them as being based, not on provable bank transfers or payments, but on him just pointing to publicly-viewable high-value bitcoin wallets and simply saying to the tax authorities, “Those are mine”.
He had hoped that the more convoluted he made the explanations, the very tangled-web he wove of fake contracts, emails and even a few instances of successfully lying to the Supreme Court in a sham ‘recovery action’, would eventually convince the pesky Australian Taxation Office to back down and leave him with his illicit loot.
But they have demonstrated an admirable level of tenacity and exceptional competency in not being bowed by his attempts to ‘baffle with bullshit’ and, as it all has been laid out for you to see in this three-part magnum opus of Craig’s Crooked Connivings, they know exactly what the truth is.
As of publishing, we are just about to witness Craig in a court case of his own making in Miami, Florida, where his lies to the estate of the Kleiman family have led to them suing for recovery of the supposed fortune in Bitcoin and IP that his trail of falsified-for-the-benefit-of-the-ATO documents and legal actions conjured up. That this can actually be used against him now in something of a, “Well, this blew up in your face, Craig” moment just typifies the nature of his ever-morphing timeline of years of deception and fraud. His own claims of a fantastical wealth he and his dead friend shared mean that they’re about to seek their own ‘recovery action’ for a potential $100,000,000,000. Yes, that’s one hundred billion in US dollars he could be found liable for.
And Craig’s opinion of this? Oh, he and Calvin Ayre, his gullible billionaire-backer, have been working hard in the preceding years leading up to this day of reckoning to apparently spin it, not as a potentially-catastrophic exposure to financial ruin but, rather, as a means by which they will claim that, win or lose, the outcome will imply that the court accepts he is Satoshi Nakamoto and, as a result, this will pave the way for Craig to seek his own court judgement in laying claim to the famed ‘Satoshi Stash’ and conduct yet-another fraudulent ‘recovery action’, an erroneous absurdity so devoid of legal and technical merit it suggests an extreme case of ‘Folie à deux’ runs rife within their toxic partnership, but something they are seemingly willing to risk untold fortune for in deranged pursuit of the title and the treasure.
You literally could not make this story up. It would be considered both too fantastical and farcical to believe!
Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. Full stop.
The real Satoshi Nakamoto remains unknown to this day, and unless and until otherwise definitely outed, “We are all Satoshi”.
Except Craig Wright, of course.
The end.
