The Faketoshi Fifteen (Times Two)
Craig Wright’s most epic lies, frauds and forgeries 2013 — 2020
Written by Arthur van Pelt
“more than enough evidence in public”
Today, September 30, 2020, is the start of the next BSV scam conference of CoinGeek, BSV’s media vehicle. Today is also the day that we learned about the latest legal slap in the face of Craig Wright.
https://twitter.com/hodlonaut/status/1311272694554546176
https://twitter.com/hascendp6/status/1311281553138429952
Congratulations, hodlonaut!
Anyway, about a week ago, Calvin Ayre, who basically runs and sponsors the whole of the BSV affinity scam show, advertised for the CoinGeek conference on Twitter, and doubled down on the false claim that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Now let’s see about that, Calvin… From the 100s and 100s of known Craig “Faketoshi” Wright lies, frauds and forgeries, I’m going to take you on a trip down Faketoshi memory lane in historical Bitcoin order, showcasing about thirty of the most epic and hilarious ones of them. Let’s go!
Project “BlackNet”
In February 2019, Craig Wright tried to rewrite Bitcoin history in the most hilarious way the Bitcoin community had seen in several years. While everyone knows that Satoshi Nakamoto started working on Bitcoin halfway 2007, and first executed the Bitcoin coding part, and only then started writing the Bitcoin whitepaper last minute, as he explained to Hal Finney on November 8, 2008…
… Craig meanwhile tried to imply he already filed a predecessor to the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2001 no less, at the Australian government. And it was aptly called “BlackNet”.
Okay… So, what actually happened: BlackNet was a 1993 project by cypherpunk and crypto anarchist Timothy “Tim” May. Tim passed away on December 13, 2018. In the days and weeks after, many “In Memoriams” for Tim were published, and for sure Craig Wright picked up the name BlackNet from one of them.
But how about the content of this extremely early BlackNet/Bitcoin paper? At closer inspection of Craig’s screenshots… Oops, number 1.
And yeah… When asked about Craig Wright and BlackNet, the Australian government said “nah, didn’t happen”. And there we have oops, number 2.
Ready for another oops? Those who paid attention might have noticed that Craig’s ex-wife Lynn Wright is mentioned as co-author on the BlackNet paper. Lynn went through a deposition in January 2020 in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, and Ira Kleiman’s counsel did not forget to bring up the subject when they found another mention of BlackNet in the evidence:
There you go, oops number 3. To summarize, Project “BlackNet” as predecessor of Bitcoin is debunked. Many, many more debunks to follow…
Fibre to Bagnoo
Craig Wright’s “fibre to Bagnoo” claim dates back to (at least) February 18, 2014 when Craig mentioned to the ATO that “we had that big fibre cabling put in” to make Bitcoin mining possible in Bagnoo (where Craig owned a cow shed) from the start of Bitcoin in January 2009.
In an April 4, 2019 deposition in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, Craig mentioned this fibre to Bagnoo again, but now for a stunning “50,000 people in the community”.
The same fibre claim was doubled down in a blog post on April 6, 2019. No mention of how many people benefited of this generous, costly, gesture of Craig though.
But then, Twitter user SeekingSatoshi went the extra mile that neither the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) in 2013–2015 during their tax fraud investigation, nor Ira Kleiman’s counsel in 2018–2020 during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit went.
SeekingSatoshi started to thoroughly inquire this outrageous fibre claim.
And it will come as no surprise to anyone I’m sure: fibre to Bagnoo never happened. As a result, we can consider half of Craig’s Bitcoin network gone. That is, if someone even considered that it existed anyway.
Faketoshi’s Team
Over the years, since 2013 when Craig Wright started his Faketoshi act, Craig claimed many people were part of his Faketoshi team. The only one of them still alive is his uncle Donald Lynam.
However, in a deposition for the Kleiman v Wright case, uncle Donald denied having edited the whitepaper, and also denied having helped set up the Bitcoin system. Which was exactly what Craig said in his deposition that Donald had done in 2008 to help him with Bitcoin… Alignment issues in the family, Craig?
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/4/kleiman-v-wright/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/582/2/kleiman-v-wright/
The Bitcoin Birth by Credit Card
“Bitcoin was birthed using a credit card payment”, he said in April 2019.
Okay. Whatever. But in Craig’s blog post (see source link), a screenshot of Craig Wright’s presumed 2008 order for obtaining bitcoin dot org in August 2008 is shown. Hold on a minute. Does this screenshot look like the screenshot below? Yes?
Yes. Busted, Craig. Again! You never obtained and paid for the bitcoin dot org domain, and only tried to fool the reader into believing something that is not true. Next!
Microsoft patch Tuesday
We have arrived at the moment that Bitcoin went live on January 3, 2009. Several times early 2019 Craig Wright claimed that it was a Microsoft update patch that made his Bitcoin network reboot on January 3, 2009, hence Bitcoin Genesis block not forming, and Bitcoin block 1 only forming on January 9, 2009. In the meantime, Craig had to set up a new network. That’s what he claims anyway.
Microsoft patch Tuesday was on January 13, 2009 however. Oops.
https://www.finder.com/dr-craig-wright-explains-the-origins-of-bitcoin-full-interview
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securitybulletinsummaries/2009/ms09-jan
The Beta of Bitcoin.
Before being deleted around the time of the ATO raids and the self-dox articles in Wired and Gizmodo magazines (December 2015), Craig Wright used his personal blog in 2013–2015 to post a handful of backdated hints to him being involved in the creation of Bitcoin.
The forgery shown below is particularly hilarious, as Craig claims that the Beta of Bitcoin was supposed to be going live on January 11, 2009.
This has no connection whatsoever to real life however, as Bitcoin started on January 3, 2009. Oops. And Satoshi Nakamoto called Bitcoin “Alpha” at the start. Another oops!
In fact, it wasn’t before October 29, 2009 that Bitcoin changed from Alpha status to Beta status. Our Faketoshi was only some 9 months off…
The Panama Trust
Next, a beautiful summary from the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit how Craig Wright has been lying about mining into a trust in Panama in 2009–2010 before the Seychelles Tulip Trust came up in 2011. This Panama trust thing, of course, never happened also.
The 2011 Bitcoin Bull Run
Here, during a June 2019 deposition in the Kleiman v Wright case, Craig Wright claimed to have been solely responsible for the global Bitcoin Bull Run in May/June 2011 (while buying Bitcoin from a Russian exchange called W&KIR, we learned in another deposition).
The facts alone that there was no OTC market in 2011, and the only place with remotely close this liquidity was Mt Gox back then, should be enough to consider this as another hilarious nonsense story by Craig. To add, the highest price in the market during the bull run was $30 for about a week. Meanwhile, Craig bought each and every Bitcoin of these “between 650,000 and 700,000” for a price way above $40. Inconceivable, as the judges of Court Florida would say.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/270/2/kleiman-v-wright/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/511/1/kleiman-v-wright/
https://twitter.com/MyLegacyKit/status/1165016106467282946
July 2011 — The Real Faketoshi Speaks!
July 2011 is where we find the first genuine, untampered mention of Bitcoin by Craig Wright. Note how he badly misspelled his “creation”, while the real Satoshi Nakamoto never misspelled Bitcoin in his public appearances in 2008–2010.
Also note how Craig somewhat understood the concept of Bitcoin (untraceable, cannot be intercepted or stopped), while his current brainchild and Bitcoin affinity scam BSV has turned into an immutable data pump monstrosity that Satoshi Nakamoto never wanted, nor promoted.
The ATO Tax Fraud starts with… Plagiarisms.
Already before Craig Wright learned about Bitcoin in 2011, he was known for his plagiarisms. So it will surprise nobody I’m sure, that the $100 million ATO tax fraud that Craig unleashed on the Australian taxpayers between 2013–2015, also started with a lot of plagiarisms “taken from internet sources, without acknowledgement”.
https://twitter.com/MyLegacyKit/status/1172153919314845696
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/547/7/kleiman-v-wright/
Jamie Wilson (CFO Hotwire Group) Resignation October 2013
In the early days of Craig Wright’s Bitcoin & Faketoshi scam, the heart of the ATO tax fraud was wrapped around obtaining Bitcoin IP and — software from the company W&K in the US.
In the process, Craig hired Jamie Wilson as CFO for his Hotwire Group vehicles, but the moment Jamie figured out that Craig was setting up the start of a fraudulent $100 million scheme… He pulled out.
Denariuz Bitcoin Bank…
In February 2014, after months of preparation, Craig Wright announced his first (and short lived) Bitcoin related endeavor: Denariuz Bank.
“Denariuz Bank would begin accepting deposits in the second half of 2014”
Nah. Never happened. More about that later.
Or Hal Finney’s Bitcoin Bank?
But since we know that Craig Wright barely has any creative ideas by himself, it is pretty fair to assume that prior art of this Bitcoin Bank can be found on the Bitcointalk forum, where Hal Finney in 2010 expands on these Bitcoin bank thoughts.
Significant Exposure
And Hotwire Group was short lived indeed, as on April 28, 2014 Hotwire, supposedly a multi-million company backed by rich investors, went bankrupt already. McGrathNicol explained the reasons for the failure of the company. Next to ”delays in receiving the $3.1 million GST refund for the September 2013 quarter”, there’s another interesting reason why the company failed:
This “significant exposure” of Craig Wright on “the Mount Gox Bitcoin registry” however, turned out to be 14.63 BTC, only worth a few thousand dollar at the moment of the Mt Gox collapse, as confirmed by Nobuaki Kobayashi, the bankruptcy trustee of Mt Gox.
On a related sidenote, it remains hilarious to see Craig, the self-proclaimed Bitcoin expert, not knowing that Mt Gox has nothing to do with a “Mount”: the name stands for “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange”.
The Dave Kleiman PGP key forgeries of March 2014
Epic in its own way, because of the sheer number we know about, are the email forgeries that Craig Wright created to support his Faketoshi act.
A special section within these forged emails is reserved for the Dave Kleiman conversations. Craig created handfuls of backdated emails in which he, and others, “talked” with Dave Kleiman about Bitcoin related topics; conversations that, of course, never happened.
Several of these backdated emails come provided with PGP signatures. Craig thought these PGP signatures would give more credibility to his forgeries, but instead, they helped timestamp the exact moments that Craig created these fraudulent emails.
In that sense, 2014 was a very productive year for our Craig. The majority of his Faketoshi forgeries have been found to originate in this year. A notable example is an email, backdated to December 20, 2012, that Craig handed over to plaintiffs as “evidence” in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.
If the typo “Dave Klieman” (it should have been Kleiman) wasn’t already a dead giveaway, then the timestamp March 12, 2014 extracted from the PGP signature should be convincing enough.
When Craig was called out in public by several Bitcoin community members and others (example above from Twitter user “@DrFunkenstein6"), he quickly pulled this “evidence” from the lawsuit, meanwhile mumbling “cannot verify the date of that email exchange”. Oops again.
A little later during the lawsuit, plaintiffs’ Expert Witness Dr. Edman had a look at this forged email from Dave Kleiman to Uyen Nguyen, and found even more inconsistencies. It turned out that indeed the key behind the PGP signature was forged on March 12, 2014, while the email forgery itself could be dated in April 2014.
The El Baraka Virtual Office
Now let’s have a look at this beauty from the Kleiman v Wright court docket.
Not only in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit (running since early 2018, expected ruling early 2021) numerous backdated email forgeries were unearthed, also ATO in their very thorough 2013–2015 inquiry came across a boatload of forged emails (23:40 AM LOLOLOL). Several examples in the screenshot of an ATO report above.
The most hilarious one however is where Craig Wright set up a non-existing virtual office in Istanbul and pretended to have been in touch, by means of a series of forged emails, with the training and support desks of El Baraka.
Everything Faketoshi: “nullity based on sham”
After three years of thorough investigation, ATO found the perfect label for what Craig Wright had been doing in 2013–2015.
As from one of these damning ATO reports, we learn that the foundation of everything Faketoshi (W&K, MJF Mining, Siemens, Bitcoin supercomputers, David Rees cooperation, El Baraka, basically everything Bitcoin IP and -software related) never existed. ATO called it a “nullity based on sham”. Later, ATO officials would declare “we firmly believe Craig Wright is not the creator of Bitcoin”.
Prof David Rees
There are still BSV scammers and Craig Wright is you-know-who believers like the individual above, who not only spread lies (Craig self-doxed to Wired & Gizmodo magazines for example, and performed a pretty ugly fraud on the Kleiman estate, so of course he “asked” for legal action to set things straight), but also didn’t catch up with the latest Craig Wright lies and spins in the Faketoshi saga.
Mentioning David Rees (and even Craig himself couldn’t spell his name right) is since several ATO reports and — hearings with Craig Wright were released in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, not that clever anymore. Craig claimed to have paid David Rees some $2 million for services on the Bitcoin protocol and other Bitcoin related things, but that never happened, said ATO:
And since mentioning Dave Kleiman netted him a $5 billion lawsuit, Craig now has 2 other individuals on his radar for Team Faketoshi. We already came across his uncle Donald Lynam in this article. The other team member will follow later.
Anyway, a big oopsie for Kurt and his scamming clan members of the BSV cult again.
The Tulip Trust
Let’s take a moment for a quick break down of the Tulip Trust saga.
- What not many know: there was not any trust thing in Craig Wright’s Faketoshi lies & forgeries before October 2014; in 2013/2014 Craig initially claimed to ATO to have full control over his (non-existing) Bitcoin stash, and only hinted a few times to “offshore trusts”. And although requested by ATO several times, Craig never signed one of the Bitcoin addresses he claimed to control.
- Things changed dramatically halfway 2014 when Craig Wright was notified by the ATO that he had to pay $1,650,000 in GST (the Australian equivalent of VAT).
- In order to *fix* this, Craig asked a Seychelles Corporate Services firm in October 2014 for a list of pre-incorporated ‘shelf’ companies available to buy. He choose, ordered and paid for one company called ‘Tulip Trading Ltd’, which they had formed in July 2011. Craig also bought a domain called TulipTrading.net in the same month. And at the same time, Craig created several backdated forgeries, like emails and contracts, to fake a non-existing line of events, as if this Tulip Trust thing was always part of his Bitcoin dealings.
Source: Craig Wright — Tulip Trust Revisited - ATO, of course, noticed these fraudulent events too, and called it a “scheme” (see following screenshot).
“acquisition would be a taxable supply, [so] you altered the scheme to insert the Seychelles trust to which you transferred the bitcoin”
Beautiful bookkeeping trick, isn’t it? Only, ATO didn’t buy it.
- Because it resulted in ATO ending up stating in 2016: “We do not accept that the Seychelles Trust existed as a matter of law or fact”.
- And if that wasn’t enough, Court Florida in the Kleiman v Wright case came to the same conclusion in 2019: “The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists.”
Et voila. The roots of Tulip Trust. A fraudulent, backdated, set up to avoid tax, and nothing else. It’s pretty funny to realize that many Faketoshi/BSV fans still believe that Craig Wright holds any Bitcoin in this trust, or elsewhere for that matter. And even more funny, Craig Wright is still using this vehicle in his scammery. More about that later, in the closing item “The Blockstream Letter”.
Who’s Scamming Who?
What follows is a mockup of images from three sources.
- Early 2014, Craig Wright valued his IP/software in the Hotwire Group at $276,268,599.
- November 2014, Craig managed to get a DeMorgan (Hotwire repackaged after it went bankrupt in April 2014) IP/software valuation of $378,475,713 from Business Reports & Values (BRV). That’s over $100,000,000 more in less than a year. Okay…
- But… In June 2015, Craig was so deep in financial trouble (because he hardly received tax returns from ATO, who closed in on the tax fraud he was performing since 2013), that he needed a bailout. Calvin Ayre jumped in and paid $1,500,000 for Craig Wright’s IP/software. That’s less than 1% of each of the two previous valuations. Hilarious!
Andrew Sommer (Lawyer DeMorgan) Termination July 2015
A Jamie Wilson-like anecdote in Craig Wright’s Bitcoin fraud career since 2013 can be found in 2015, when his lawyer terminated his engagement with Craig Wright.
Andrew Sommer also represented DeMorgan Group, which was, as said, basically the Hotwire Group repackaged. Hotwire went bankrupt early 2014 because ATO refused to pay all the fraudulent tax claims to Craig Wright.
Andrew gave as reason “integrity of documents”, as he was notified by the ATO that a handful of Craig Wright emails, send to and received from several ATO employees, were found forgeries of all kinds: backdated, never existed at all, or contained edited content.
And if this wasn’t already epic enough, Craig recently denied (in a deposition March 18, 2020) that this termination event ever happened. Must be an “on the spectrum” thingy, I guess…
The Faith of being an ATO Employee
Craig Wright must have caused quite a few shockwaves in the ranks of ATO. Because…:
And…
No further comment…
The Bird Graph Debacle
A few months ago, we learned that Craig Wright’s 2017 PhD thesis “The Quantification of Information Systems Risk” was heavily plagiarized. Just one hilarious example from this thesis:
The Rolling Iceberg Order
From the section “Death Threats to BTC”, this remains a classic. Dated September 29, 2018, this “rolling iceberg order followed by significant orders of other exchanges. It is expected that the value [of BTC] will drop significantly and will be matched by a 10x leveraged short.” never happened of course.
“A Fatal Flaw in BTC”
For the fun of it, another “there won’t be any BTC at the end of next year” death threat that never materialized. It appears we have passed December 31, 2019 safely with Bitcoin.
“No Split”
Some more Craig Wright death poetry, from the time that Craig’s camp lost the hash war in November 2018, and BSV split from BCH, which is a fork of Bitcoin. And it appears this split was the intention anyway, given that Craig and friends set up BSV related infrastructure already 6 months earlier (source https://twitter.com/MyLegacyKit/status/1224636976906883076).
10,000+ Patents
“Not two, 10,000.” he spoke in April 2019. Let’s note that Craig Wright is building on his patent portfolio since 2015, as he promised Calvin Ayre, Stefan Matthews and Robert McGregor during his June 2015 bailout, that he would make them billionaires, according Andrew O’Hagan’s article The Satoshi Affair.
Now let’s check this out for a bit. In the public domain, only around some 150–200 of these patents can be found currently, while nChain claimed in March 2019* that 666 patents had been filed till then. In any case, Craig Wright will be busy with patents till at least he is 110 years old if he holds on to this delivery speed.
* source: https://coingeek.com/the-devil-is-in-the-patent-details/
What should worry the fine people at nChain though, is the technical relevance of Craig his patents. That relevance is exactly zero (0.00 to be precise), and that means it’s the “weakest portfolio” in the blockchain industry:
Kissing Jim Morrison
For an even more hilarious reason, this tweet with video clip of Twitter user “@StopAndDecrypt” is very interesting. Please click on the source link to watch the video, as it is still available on Twitter. You will find Craig claiming:
”I did a whole lot of shit as a teenager. Lots of parties, I’m glad no one remembers. I actually went to a party back in the nineties where I ended up wearing fish in my ears and kissing Jim Morrison for some reason.”
The response to this hilarious nonsense is predictable…
The Story of The Bonded Courier
So, when Craig gets irritated in his private Slack room because he’s being called out on his nonsense, it’s time to tell the whole story. The story of the bonded courier. It all started with a hearing in June 2019, where Craig mentioned this bonded courier a handful of times in relationship to the infamous Tulip Trust:
But, in August 2019, Judge Reinhart was not very impressed by what he heard about this bonded courier, and concluded:
Then, finally, in January 2020, Judge Bloom ruled:
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Twitter troll mob, but also some of the BSV fans, went totally bonkers with this new Craig Wright meme. Calvin Ayre however, was obviously not amused.
Bring Out Yer Dead!
Although neither epic, nor hilarious, as morbid would better describe Craig Wright’s fetish: Craig abused many dead individuals that couldn’t object to this disgusting behavior anymore, in his Bitcoin and Faketoshi scam. So far, his Faketoshi team alone consisted of:
- Dave Kleiman (died April 2013, but Dave’s heirs landed Craig a $5 billion lawsuit, so Dave’s out since 2019)
- David Rees (died August 2013, but ATO said “nah, didn’t happen”, so David is also out)
- In a March 2020 deposition of Craig Wright in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit however, we learned about a new, deceased, individual that was supposedly part of the Faketoshi team: Gareth Williams (a code-breaking spy for MI6, died August 2010)
“His story is unbelievable.” we hear Vel Freedman, head of Ira Kleiman’s counsel say. Indeed. Other dead people that Craig Wright mentioned or otherwise abused since he started his Faketoshi act were Tim May and Hal Finney.
The iPhone Incident
“I used an iPhone once in my life, I survived it one week, then I played golf. This was 2006. I beat the iPhone to death literally.” — Deposition Craig Wright March 16, 2020
Oh, really, Craig? 2006?
https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/the-iphone-in-australia-turns-10-but-should-we-be-celebrating/news-story/4d60c95780343dcc2343102ff04cc070
https://personal-financial.com/2020/06/06/in-addition-to-bitcoin-would-craig-wright-have-invented-the-iphone-cryptocurrencies/
No further comment…
145 Signings
“Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message.”
Amen. With this clear message, on May 25, 2020 Craig’s so-called Tulip Trust list that he handed over to plaintiffs in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, was being debunked.
The Blockstream Letter
Let’s top off this overview with the most recent craziness from the Faketoshi camp: a letter sent to Blockstream by SCA Ontier, Craig Wright’s lawyer in the UK. This letter nicely combines several lies, frauds and forgeries of Craig that we have seen before in this article, and introduces a few others:
- The Tulip Trust nonsense
- Craig Wright owning substantial BTC
- Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto
- Craig Wright being “hacked” again
- Craig Wright owning Bitcoin name copyright
- Craig Wright owning the Bitcoin database
First, don’t get me going about Craig’s *I was hacked* nonsense:
https://twitter.com/MyLegacyKit/status/1264349301267980300
But probably the most hilarious anecdote on this scam letter of SCA Ontier is the story about the so-called 1Feex address. It contains 80,000 BTC stolen from Mt Gox in 2011!*
* Source: https://blog.wizsec.jp/2020/06/mtgox-march-2011-theft.html
Bonus
For those who just can’t get enough of this Faketoshi stuff, my most epic tweetstorm so far about Craig Wright (called “His Bitcoin Fraud Career”) with even more lies, frauds and forgeries can be found here. Enjoy!
