‘Your Honor, The Dog Ate My Homework!’
The ‘world’s most accredited and certified cybersecurity expert’, and self-proclaimed ‘inventor of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto’, Craig Steven Wright, better known as “Faketoshi” as he never provided any meaningful evidence of his Satoshi-ness since 2014 when he entered the cosplayer scene, suffered 20 years of relentless ‘hacks’. That’s what Craig claimed many times, at least. And many times people have been accused of these hacks, however no one was ever inquired, sued, nor went to jail…
And no one ever mapped out all these ‘hack’ claims of Craig Wright, as far as I know. So I thought it’s about time for a comprehensive history — and thorough debunk — of all Craig Wright’s “the dog ate my homework” stories.
Written by Arthur van Pelt - proofread by Peter Scott-Morgan
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material may become available after the publication of this article, it could have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, and become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
“Q. For all the forgeries we’re going to examine today and tomorrow morning, have you seen any evidence that any of those forgeries were created by anyone but Craig Wright?”
A. I have not.” — Dr. Edman, forensic expert, November 2021
Craig Wright, Australian born but currently residing in the UK, fled his home country in late 2015, narrowly escaping the clutches of the Australian Tax Office (ATO) who raided his home and office on December 8, 2015.
Craig Wright is arguably the most famous of the self-proclaimed ‘Bitcoin Founders’(*) who have all, like Craig, been found to be lacking in any evidential substance of being Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto. In Craig’s case, there is also a substantial amount of disturbingly conflicting statements and fraudulent material surrounding his claims, which is often met with the get-out-of-jail card claim, “I was hacked!”.
(*) who doesn’t remember:
- From Germany: Jörg “Faketoshi” Molt (who was arrested for fraud last year)
- From Belgium: Jurgen Etienne Guido “Faketoshi” Debo
- From Pakistan: Bilal “Faketoshi” Khalid (who recently published a book)
This article will try to map out as many of these ‘hack’ claims as possible in approximate chronological order. And there are many!
We will discover that Craig’s ‘pesky hackers’ almost always appear suddenly when all evidence has been proven to be forged, altered, or miraculously vanished, and when all other excuses have been exhausted.
These claims, we will also learn, do not survive any mild, let alone thorough, scrutiny. As it stands now, there has been no evidence whatsoever provided by Craig Wright to support any of his ‘hack’ claims.
Let’s go.
For the first known public occurance of a Craig Wright hack claim we have to go back almost 20 years, where, in an Australian court room, Craig is accused by claimant Ryan of breaking a contractual non-compete clause, and he is dragged into court to face a string of judges over it. In this multi-year case, we see Craig Wright’s ‘Modus Operandi’ play out when it comes to lawsuits: lies, deceit mixed with forgeries, and appeals until the end to try and exhaust his opponent.
This lawsuit saw the first public instance of Craig claiming to be hacked…
2003–2006: The Lost Ryan v Wright Lawsuit
The Ryan case didn’t go well for Craig Wright from the get-go. A few quotes from the November 6, 2003 intermediate verdict:
“23 I am satisfied, particularly having regard to the evidence relating to an alleged e-mail approach by Mr Wright to Mr Dave Spencer of the RIC, and to Mr Wright’s dealings with Mr Tristan Geering of the ASX, that there is a serious question to be tried in relation to the alleged breaches by Mr Wright of cl 13 of the shareholders’ agreement. There is evidence that would show, if accepted, that the approaches made by Mr Wright to, or the dealings between Mr Wright and, the ASX and the RIC were conducted not for the benefit of the company, but for the benefit of Mr and Mrs Wright, either directly or through Ridge’s Estate.
25 I am satisfied that there is a real threat that, unless restrained, Mr Wright will continue to approach, or deal with, customers of the company.
27 Further, having regard to the clandestine nature of the dealings between Mr Wright and the company’s customers, I am satisfied that it would not be appropriate to permit Mr Wright to deal with customers of the company on the basis that he do so as the company’s agent and for the benefit of the company. I think that there is a real risk that Mr Wright, if permitted to deal on a limited basis with customers of the company, might seek to undermine the company and its business. In this context, Mr Anthony Wilkes, a system administrator employed by the company and, perhaps, a member (see para [18] above), says in an affidavit that on 15 October 2003 he met and had lunch with Mr Geering of ASX. He says that in the course of that lunch Mr Geering confirmed that Mr Wright “is still working in the ASX”. Further, he says, Mr Geering said that Mr Wright “said openly that he would spend over a million dollars to see DeMorgan go under”.”
So on November 15, 2004 Craig was sentenced to 28 days in jail:
“23 In my view Mr Wright’s deliberate flouting of his undertaking makes this a serious offence. His lack of contrition exacerbates its seriousness. There is a need to bring home to a contemnor the seriousness of his contempt. For the purposes of the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999, s 5(2) these are my reasons for my determining that a sentence of imprisonment is required in this case. I propose to sentence Craig Wright to a term of imprisonment of 28 days. Under s 46 I am not required to set a non-parole period.”
However, Craig Wright, desperate to not spend any time in jail, appealed this decision in 2005, and three new judges (Handley JA, Hodgson JA and Hunt AJA) were handling Craig’s appeal. His appeal was dismissed with costs, however. And this appeal is where Craig started to employ the “I was hacked, your honor!” excuses.
“44 The appellant [Craig Wright] said that a third party could have accessed his secure email address at CSU to create and send the disputed email. Such a person would have needed to use the appellant’s username and a password (orange 4(5)), or else to successfully hack into the system. It was not established that anyone at the company had the appellant’s password or that his system had been penetrated.”
And then… after this hint in the last sentence, the judges burned it all down for our Craig. There was no proof of the hack. All of the evidence was actually pointing to Craig Wright creating a new forgery to try and create a case for an appeal! And this, dear reader, will become the story of Craig Wright’s life.
Let’s run through a few juicy quotes from this appeal verdict. Here is where we find the roots of Craig Wright’s shameless attitude towards justice and legal proceedings, and how judges respond to that. It also includes damning remarks about Craig’s credibility that we know so well from his lawsuits in later years.
“40 The disputed email was found on a computer at the appellant’s home during the Anton Pillar raid on 16 September 2003 (blue 109). It was found on a temporary Internet file opened and viewed during the raid when a copy to self folder used to store email messages online was accessed (blue 107, 108, 109). It had not originated on that computer, but had been sent from a remote location. However its presence in a “copy to self” file supported an inference that it had been sent by the appellant.
54 In his affidavit of 23 August the appellant said that the calls from his mobile phone on 10 September (sup blue 1/132) at 11.09 am and 11.48 am were shown as sent from Cowan and Berowra respectively so that at the time the disputed email was sent he must have been in his car approximately 20 minutes away from his home and could not have sent it (orange 17).
55 The mobile phone records for 16 September show that this inference cannot be drawn. Times on the copy of the disputed email found on the appellant’s hard drive (blue 109) showed that the raid was in progress at 11.47 am on 16 September. The appellant said that at that time he was outside his home using his mobile telephone (orange 17). His mobile phone records (sup blue 1/132) show that he made phone calls at 11.33 am, 11.46 am, and 11.59 am. These too are shown to have been made from Berowra, as was one of those calls said to have been made by the appellant from his car 20 minutes drive from his home on 10 September. It is therefore clear that the mobile phone records for 10 September do not establish that the appellant was not at his home at 11.23 am when the disputed email was sent.
56 The relevant emails to and from Mr Spencer of RIC of 10 September appear to start with one from the appellant at 12.40 am, although the text is not in evidence (sup blue 2/355–6). This produced a reply from Mr Spencer at 8.41 (356) and a response from the appellant at 8.44 (355). He said that he was then at Vodafone Chatswood and followed up this last email with a phone call to Mr Spencer (blue 148(21)).
57 The email at 11.16 am (354) was acknowledged by the appellant as genuine in his affidavit of 14 October 2004 (blue 148(22)). It was sent seven minutes after the appellant is recorded as making a call on his mobile phone from Cowan at 11.09 am. The disputed email followed at 11.23 am. The subject of both was described as “Re: specs”. The next email from the appellant at 12.27 pm that day showed as its subject “RE: Review Document”. It was sent in response to an earlier email from Mr Spencer recorded there but not shown independently (352). This seems to have been a response to an email sent by the appellant to Mr Spencer the day before (359) which referred to servers and was headed “Review Document”. On 30 September Mr Spencer sent a memorandum to the appellant (sup blue 2/318) which relevantly stated:
“Thank you for submitting a quotation for block of security consultancy hours based around our current check point implementation. Unfortunately we will not be taking up your offer of services opting for a proposal supplied by another organisation.”
58 This may have been a response to the disputed email (T 37).
59 The disputed email was produced on subpoena by RIC along with the other emails passing between the appellant and Mr Spencer. It was apparently received without provoking any email response from Mr Spencer asking what it was all about. The parties were again in communication by email the following day (sup blue 2/325, 347).
60 It would have been extremely difficult for an outsider to fabricate the disputed email containing the details it did [para 11]. Mr Spencer and the appellant communicated with each other many times on 9, 10 and 11 September by email, telephone, and in person. Somehow this email managed to make sense and fit in with these other communications. The fabrication of such an email by an outsider without this being immediately detected by the recipient is glaringly improbable. A copy of the email reached the appellant. He replied to his emails without delay and if the disputed email had been sent to him by a third party he would have become aware of its existence almost immediately.
61 The arguably fresh evidence of the email records from CSU is credible but completely neutral. It establishes that the company could have accessed the appellant’s email address at CSU in order to sent the disputed email, but does not prove that it did so or establish that as a matter of probability. This evidence leads nowhere. It is not capable of giving rise to a reasonable doubt about the appellant’s guilt and could not have produced a different result if it had been admitted at the trial.
63 The probative force of the new evidence depends in large measure on the appellant’s credibility and reliability. His explanations and interpretations of these and related documents are contradicted at critical points, on which there is no independent evidence to support him. The appellant’s contradictory evidence about the email of 11.16 am on 10 September 2003 raises doubts about his credibility, as does his evidence based on the calls from his mobile phone that day.
77 I agree with Handley JA that the proposed fresh evidence lacked the necessary credibility and materiality, particularly in circumstances where it depended in essential respects on the appellant’s own credibility, which was strongly under challenge.”
Boom. That brings us up to speed in the Ryan case. Let’s note that Craig Wright did not go to jail in the end, but had to perform 250 hours of community services instead. What remained was a AU$425,000 debt.
April 1, 2008: Cutting Edge Hacking Techniques Certification
It appears that when Craig Wright realized his hacking techniques needed some improvement after he lost the Ryan lawsuit due to sloppy forgeries, he must have decided that he could use some training. In April 2008 he became certified in ‘Cutting Edge Hacking Techniques’. To add, Craig was also granted a SANS ‘Next Evolution in Digital Forensics — Hands on’ certificate in 2007, and a SANS ‘Network Forensics’ certificate in 2009.
All this knowledge-building didn’t help much though; Craig Wright’s sloppy forgeries, with only his digital and other fingerprints all over them, are still easily debunked as such.
2008–2011: Hacking A Coffee Machine And A Boeing 747 Engine
Only added for completion, here are two examples of other hacks that Craig Wright performed in his career which had reached the public media: on June 17, 2008 we can find the hacking of a coffee machine on the SecurityFocus blog, and on September 24, 2011 we can find the hacking of a Boeing 747 engine, as Craig published on his blog.
“ A while back now, but many of the same systems are in place in the same way, I was contracted to test the systems on a Boeing 747. They had added a new video system that ran over IP. They segregated this from the control systems using layer 2 — VLANs. We managed to break the VLANs and access other systems and with source routing could access the Engine management systems.
The response, “the engine management system is out of scope.”
For those who do not know, 747’s are big flying Unix hosts. At the time, the engine management system on this particular airline was Solaris based. The patching was well behind and they used telnet as SSH broke the menus and the budget did not extend to fixing this. The engineers could actually access the engine management system of a 747 in route. If issues are noted, they can re-tune the engine in air.
The issue here is that all that separated the engine control systems and the open network was NAT based filters. There were (and as far as I know this is true today), no extrusion controls. They filter incoming traffic, but all outgoing traffic is allowed. For those who engage in Pen Testing and know what a shoveled shell is… I need not say more.”
The hacking of a Boeing 747 engine made the internet rounds, and found its way to several media outlets, like here and here.
June 20, 2011: A ‘Hacked’ ASIC Certificate Of Registration
The Kleiman v Wright case is a treasure box loaded to the brim with dozens and dozens of forgeries. Dr. Edman, the forensic expert in the lawsuit, found at least 45 to 50 forgeries which are described in no less than four forensic reports, and the ‘crypto-community’ who was following this case with interest, found handfuls more in the public court docket of the case (*).
(*) For which the ‘crypto-community’ — and you know who you are! — received a well deserved mention and compliment from Vel Freedman, the head of Ira Kleiman’s counsel, in his nothing short of epic May 15, 2020 “PLAINTIFFS’ OMNIBUS SANCTIONS MOTION”:
“But it’s not just the expense or time. It has taken the combined effort of Plaintiffs, their counsel, experts, and a devoted crypto-community to expose the forgeries, lies, and misrepresentations to date. Despite this herculean effort, Plaintiffs are confident many more forgeries and lies will remain unrebutted and be used against Plaintiffs at trial. But beyond bolstering Wright’s defense with lies and forgeries, his misconduct has also prejudiced Plaintiffs’ ability to prepare their case for trial by gathering the real evidence. Wright has sought to obscure and conceal the nature and activities of his partnership with David by producing numerous fabricated communications with him, failing to even search the partnership’s email and forum accounts for evidence, and refusing to provide a true bitcoin list for Plaintiffs to trace.”
I will not list all these ‘hacked’ forgeries in this article; there would be too many. That said, I would like to highlight one forgery that never received the attention it deserved. It is a ‘Certificate of Registration’ that at first glance looked like it was issued on June 20, 2011 by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) for Panopticrypt Pty Ltd.
So, did ASIC hack Craig Wright, what happened here? When I looked up Panopticrypt on the ASIC website, it turned out that Panopticrypt is (or more accurately ‘was’, as this company was dissolved in 2020 by the ATO during their ongoing criminal investigation of Craig Wright) an existing company previously part of Craig Wright’s little Australian Bitcoin scam empire.
Before we try to find an answer to the what-happened-here question, please read the analysis of Dr. Edman first. Dr. Edman examined this Panopticrypt certificate and found it, unsurprisingly, to be a forgery.
(Of course, ASIC didn’t hack Craig Wright. No one is seriously blaming ASIC here at the moment. Later in this article, however, we will find a hilarious story about how Craig tried to make it believable that the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) hacked him, an event that blew up in his face.)
Let’s have a look at the dates that Dr. Edman mentioned in his report about this forged certificate of registration, and put them in the right order. Dr. Edman’s dates are in bold type. Then, allow me to add a few more dates to that list for context.
June 19, 2011: ASIC application for registration of Panopticrypt
June 20, 2011: ASIC registration of Panopticrypt
June 20, 2011: (back)date of forged Panopticrypt certificate
April 16, 2013: ASIC application for registration of Coin-Exch
April 17, 2013: ASIC registration of Coin-Exch
April 17, 2013: date of genuine Coin-Exch certificate
September 10, 2014: ASIC change of registered address of Panopticrypt
October 17, 2014: buys Tulip Trading Ltd, Seychelles
October 17, 2014: creation of forged Tulip Trust documents, emails
October 23, 2014: creation of forged Panopticrypt certificate (from Coin-Exch certificate)
October 30, 2014: the Cloudcroft C01n and Tulip Trading supercomputers scam kicks off (*)
(*) On a side note, it remains funny to see Craig Wright explicitly state in this 2014 transcript of a self-interview that he was not mining Bitcoin!
Not mining with his previous supercomputer from 2013 (called Sukuriputo Okane, of which the ATO concluded that it didn’t exist) and also not mining with his current supercomputers C01n and Tulip Trading (who Craig claimed were merged into one supercomputer a year later in 2015, but this mega supercomputer was also debunked by the ATO in 2015 with them commenting, “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”).
Let’s check out what Craig Wright claims on the Cloudcroft website in 2014:
“Now, many of you will probably think mining Bitcoin, if we are going to be running a large supercomputer, well, would you want to mine Bitcoin? This is our second one, and back in the day, you could have mined a lot of Bitcoin on the previous generation that we were running, it was mainly graphics cards so GPU based and at the time that would have been comparable to many of the other people out there. Now, however, it is a little bit different, and even then we weren’t actually mining, what we were doing, is a whole lot of PSOs, this is optimising code, so evolutionary programming etc. One of the things we are now doing, is we are finding that even if we wanted to mine, the Xenon PHIs aren’t terribly good as miners, but they are really great at running lot of those really, really, highly parallel code.”
Not mining Bitcoin with his three non-existing supercomputers, right? But what did Craig Wright tell his audience, a Federal Judge and a trial Jury in Miami, under oath some seven years later on November 8, 2021?
“BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. You say to Mark Ferrier — in response to: “Where did I get this from,” you say: “I have a trust overseas. I moved it and the mining process to Dave Kleiman when I had a few issues with the tax people.”
A. I have to apologize for my lack of clarity here. There are two different things, and I don’t consider them the same. There is something in Bitcoin called Testnet. When I was running those large computers, we were testing scaling. Over Testnet, you have what is like Bitcoin but it gets reset every month or so. So the Bitcoin all disappear. I wasn’t doing that to earn Bitcoin. It was to test the scaling of Bitcoin to have millions of transactions a second. So when I talk about the mining process, I’m talking about CO1N, the supercomputer, the running of the computer system to test scaling.”
So, was Craig Wright not mining Bitcoin with these non-existing supercomputers, or was he mining Bitcoin after all (but on Testnet) with these non-existing supercomputers? Feel free to draw your own 5D chess conclusions, dear reader…
Let’s go back to the Panopticrypt forgery, the faked certificate of registration. What do all these dates in this list tell us? At a bare minimum, the timeline tells us that October 2014 was a pretty busy month for Craig Wright’s ‘Phony Works Studio’. Setting up a new line of fake supercomputers, creating numerous forgeries for the Tulip Trust scam (learn more about these things in “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2”), and forging a certificate of registration for a currently unknown purpose!
Furthermore, Craig can be praised for having managed to create a forgery without his signature forgery flaw: a date error. It would have been very typical for sloppy-forger Craig to put a date like June 2, 2011 or June 20, 2010 on the forgery, instead of the correct registration date of Panopticrypt: June 20, 2011.
Now what has this specific forgery to do with hacking, or being hacked, you might ask? I’ll tell you: this forged certificate is, to me at least, a perfect example of forged evidence that only Craig Wright would make for a specific, but fraudulent, purpose. There is literally no reason I can think of that someone else, from ex-staff to Blockstream personnel or whoever is on Craig’s blame-list, that would have the unique combination of means, motives, opportunity, incentives and skills to create EXACTLY THIS forgery.
July 2011 Onward: LulzSec And Anonymous Hacked Me!
The following few quotes are taken from an article that Craig Wright wrote which was published on October 17, 2019 on his Medium blog.
“In 2011 I wrote extensively about numerous hacker groups including anonymous [Craig means Anonymous (*)] and Lulz [here he means Lulz Security, better known as LulzSec (*)]. Unfortunately, amongst other things this made me a target. My companies were broken into, my personal email and much more was accessed by hackers. I had accounts created using my information and I had people targeting my family.”
<<snip>>
For the fun of it, let’s also lift another failed announcement, from a long, long list of failed announcements — ranging from altcoin BSV reaching $1,200 with 98% certainty to Craig his ‘rolling iceberg orders’ which would cause Bitcoin tank to a price of zero or thereabouts — from Craig’s article too:
“”So, I apologise that I’ve not been able to set everything right from the beginning, but everything now is in place so that no one will ever alter the system again. In the next 15 months you’re going to see an incredible bloodbath. Thousands of criminals, in all areas of crime who have used bitcoin or any other blockchain are going to start to bleed. It’s now time to talk because nothing can be done to stop this. Nothing can be done to me or my family that can change the path now. There is no threat, no act that can ever redeem these people will stop what is coming to get them. Bitcoin is a juggernaut and those criminals who ever thought of using bitcoin are about to be ground under its wheels.”
For the record, the deadline for that ‘incredible bloodbath’ passed on January 17, 2021.
(*) From Wikipedia: “Lulz Security, commonly abbreviated as LulzSec, was a black hat computer hacking group that claimed responsibility for several high profile attacks, including the compromise of user accounts from PlayStation Network in 2011. The group also claimed responsibility for taking the CIA website offline.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.”
So there you have it, we can add LulzSec and Anonymous, two infamous hacker groups, to the list of hackers that have been targeting Craig Wright during his Bitcoin ‘career’. Of course, as usual, there is no evidence of this relentless hacking and family harassment, so we will have to take Craig’s claims at face value. Again. (Which we won’t do, naturally).
What is extremely remarkable though, this is only one of two occassions that we know of where Craig opened up about a couple of articles that he wrote about these hacker groups in 2011. The other occassion is a YouTube video from the same era, where Craig, on stage during a conference speech, is basically making the same ‘hacked by LulzSec and Anonymous’ claim, unfortunately I was not able to locate this video anymore.
Note however, that Craig will not tell you when in 2011 exactly, and where — The Conversation website — he wrote these articles! Is there maybe a reason why Craig doesn’t want you to find out, to go and read these articles?
Because… there is something very intriguing about these two articles, besides Craig being ‘hacked’ after publishing them. These are the two 2011 articles in question:
“Are Anonymous and LulzSec about to hack PayPal for WikiLeaks?”
“LulzSec, Anonymous … freedom fighters or the new face of evil?”
Now let’s do a deep dive into the many comments found under these articles. Don’t worry, I’ll provide screenshots with links to these comments for your convenience.
What do we notice there, in these comments?
Craig Wright is casually mentioning “bit coins” in the comments of his August 9, 2011 article (second link above). This is, as far as we know, the very first time that Craig Wright mentioned Bitcoin in public. And let’s immediately emphasize that Satoshi Nakamoto had never spelled his brainchild like that! Satoshi is only known for spellings like Bitcoin, bitcoin and bitcoins. To be fair, he once made a typo, which I will get back to in a bit.
And Craig mentioned “Bit Coin (Bit Coin)” a bit later in the comments (and again, Satoshi has never spelled it like that):
Then Craig Wright returned to the July 29, 2011 article, also about Anonymous and LulzSec (first link above), that he wrote for The Conversation, and mentioned “BitCoin” twice in the comments section. Again, Satoshi never spelled it like that in public. There is only one known instance where Satoshi used this spelling in 2009 between January and October in a ‘readme’ text file added to the first few Bitcoin software packages. Satoshi corrected that spelling mistake in October 2009, and always spelled ‘Bitcoin’ or ‘bitcoin(s)’ on public forums and in private emails in the 2009–2011 era).
Also notable: Craig was at this point in time (July/August 2011) obviously so ‘well informed’ in the Bitcoin world “we also have to remember that WikiLeaks was the site that selected PayPal and not one of the alternatives. WL could have selected BitCoin, but it did not.” that he had missed the news on June 15, 2011, it seems.
And also, Craig had not bothered to check the WikiLeaks website either it appears, because from halfway June 2011 onward, this information was available on the WikiLeaks Support page:
And I mean, the real Satoshi was well aware that the WikiLeaks and Bitcoin discussion in PC World would kickstart a new phase for Bitcoin, including potentially WikiLeaks accepting Bitcoin for donations. As Satoshi mentioned on the Bitcoin Forum that “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s net, and the swarm is headed towards us.” half a year earlier, just before he left!
Yeah.
Exactly.
And how about Craig Wright’s spelling of Bitcoin? Let’s compare this with Satoshi Nakamoto’s spelling of Bitcoin, where we know he only made one typo in the software’s readme file, as I just explained.
I’m pretty sure Craig Wright will explain all this someday, in his own 5D chess logic, under oath in a court room. And it will all make less sense after that.
Until then, I rest my case, ladies and gentlemen.
November 19, 2012: Bitmessage Released
(But Craig used it long before that date? Huh?)
This is, if you ask me, hands down one of the most hilarious moments in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit that run from February 2018 till December 2021. Actually, this case has not fully concluded yet as, as we speak, plaintiff Ira Kleiman still has an appeal running for a new trial, while the other plaintiff, W&K Info Defense Research, already won $143 million including pre-judgment interest from Craig Wright. Anyway, that’s another story for another day.
So what happened here with Bitmessage?
During the Kleiman lawsuit, several alleged email forgeries popped up, that were created with an email program called Bitmessage. Then, the developer of the Bitmessage software, Jonathan Warren, was asked during a deposition on July 24, 2019, how likely it could have been that his brainchild Bitmessage was — here we go — hacked from his devices before the release date, and was spread on the ‘dark web’ where Craig Wright ‘might’ have picked it up to create and send emails (mostly to Dave Kleiman) several months BEFORE the release date of Bitmessage on November 19, 2012. This was necessary as a handful of the alleged email forgeries contained dates, you guessed it, before November 19, 2012.
In other words, imagine this. The suggestion here is that Craig Wright might have been using a hacked, stolen and illegally obtained dark web product, and Craig’s counsel is happily playing that Q&A game IN COURT to counter the Craig-created-forgeries accusations. Hilarious!
There’s no doubt, of course, that Craig Wright, and only Craig Wright, created the backdated email forgeries with, likely, a legit copy of the Bitmessage software that he obtained long after November 2012. Why long after November 2012, you ask? Because Craig used so-called ‘version 4’ type of email addresses in his forgeries. And when Jonathan Warren was asked “Can you say — after reviewing this document, can you say with confidence that version 4 addresses were not available before August 12, 2013?” he answered with “Yes.”. Conclusion: the email forgeries were created after August 12, 2013. And that perfectly fits the timeframe of when we know Craig started to create the Dave Kleiman and Bitcoin related forgeries: after Dave Kleiman’s death in April 2013.
One example of the Bitmessage forgeries is this one dated November 6, 2012, which discusses the ‘trust process’ around a loan to Craig Wright:
Wait, a loan from ‘the trust’ to Craig Wright? Yes, Craig is well known to take loans on his Tulip Trust whenever he can. These loans are considered Nigerian prince advance fee scams, since this trust does not own any assets, and has been called out (by the ATO and court Florida, for example) as an empty vehicle, put together with a lot of forged and backdated evidence.
A very recent, and at the same time interesting, example of such a loan demand popped up in a presentation that Craig Wright apparently did in Dublin on June 20, 2022 during IoTWeek. I couldn’t help putting my egg in the basket about it too.
Faketoshi Fun Fact: this is not the first time that Craig Wright is considered a Nigerian prince. On March 16, 2020 an exhibit with code number 52146 dated March 30, 2016 was being discussed in relationship to the umpteenth hack of Craig in his Kleiman v Wright deposition.
Look how that went:
“Q. Dr. Wright, I am going to upload into the share file what you produced as the defense 52146.
(Exhibit Defense 52146 marked for identification)
A. I can see that.
Q. It starts at the bottom of the e-mail chain with an e-mail from you that discusses leaks. It relates to a thread about Craig Wright being a Nigerian prince; do you see that?
A. I see that.
Q. Alan Edwards from the Outside Organization responds to that e-mail that this kind of docket(?) is not helpful; do you see that?
A. Yes, we had another hack in the organization and I responded saying that I did not want — again, documents were being hacked and leaked in our organization, and I sent it round for someone to do something.”
Did you notice Stefan Matthews’ response “I would not rule out the fingerprints of Uyen [Nguyen] in here with staff connections.” in this little email thread?
And this is how we circled back to a mention of Uyen Nguyen in relationship to hacks and leaks of Craig Wright related material in March 2016!
Uyen Nguyen, be warned, you’re on the shortlist.
OK, back to the Bitmessage subject. Let’s find out how this November 6, 2012 Bitmessage forgery was being discussed during Jonathan Warren’s July 2019 deposition. In the following quotes from the deposition transcript, Mr Kass and Ms McGovern are members of Craig Wright’s counsel, while Mr Freedman is head of Ira Kleiman’s counsel. Also note that the writer of the transcript did not spell Dave Kleiman correctly: it was misspelled as ‘Kleinman’.
“Q. I’m going to hand you what will be marked as Plaintiff’s 9.
(Whereupon, a Document was marked as Plaintiff’s Exhibit 9 for identification, as of this date.)
Q. First I would like to direct your attention to the message that’s displayed on the page bearing Bates number 0204. What is the subject of the message that’s displayed here?
A. Do you mean the one that’s selected?
Q. Correct.
A. The trust process.
MR. KASS: I object to the use of this document. Mr. Warren’s not on it, and I don’t see how he has a basis to provide any testimony on it.
MR. FREEDMAN: It’s our position that he created the software that this message is being displayed at, so he has the ability to opine the authenticity of the message that predates the program’s actual creation, but your objection is preserved.
MR. KASS: Mr. Warren is not an expert witness. He’s a fact witness. And that objection goes for all these other Bitmessages that have been presented and that will be presented during this deposition.
MS. McGOVERN: Do you intend to have this witness opine as to the state of mind of messages between two individuals on a document that he is not on and he’s not a recipient of and he’s not the subject of? Is that the intention?
MR. FREEDMAN: Our intention is to get his testimony, his honest testimony.
Q. Who does this document indicate the message was sent by?
MR. KASS: Objection.
A. The document indicates Dave Kleinman.
Q. And who does the document indicate the message was sent to?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. The message indicates Craig S. Wright.
Q. And when does the document indicate the Bitmessage was received?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. It indicates Tuesday, November 6, 2012.
Q. Would it have been possible for Craig Wright to receive a Bitmessage from Dave Kleinman on November 6, 2012?
MR. KASS: Lack of predicate. Objection.
A. I don’t see how it could be.
Q. Why is that?
A. Because the software was not publicly released at that time.
Q. When was the software publicly released?
A. November 19, 2012.
Q. Do you have any doubt that the date this document shows as the message being received is forged?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form. Lack of predicate.
A. No.”
Now let’s catch up with a few more quotes from the deposition. Here is where the ‘hack’ subject, with Craig Wright involved, comes back.
“Q. Mr. Warren, do you believe your devices were ever hacked?
A. No.
Q. Do you have any reason to believe that they were hacked?
A. No.
Q. Did you tell Mr. Kass that you cannot definitively — you cannot say definitively that you were not hacked because anything is possible?
A. Yes.
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
Q. Why did you tell Mr. Kass that you cannot say definitively that you were not hacked?
A. Because a hacker might have gotten in without me being aware.
Q. What is the probability that you were hacked?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. I have no —
MR. KASS: Absolutely no predicate.
Q. What is the probability you were hacked, someone took a copy of Bitmessage and distributed that on the dark web?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form. Lack of predicate.
[Jonathan Warren’s answer redacted in transcript, unfortunately]
MR. FREEDMAN: That’s fine.
Q. Would you say it is likely that you were hacked?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. No.
Q. Would you say it’s unlikely that you were hacked?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. Yes.
Q. Why do you say it’s unlikely that you were hacked?
A. Because if someone was to hack into my computer, they could have done a lot more than steal a copy of Bitmessage. For example, they could have stolen cryptocurrency.
Q. To your knowledge, has cryptocurrency ever been stolen from you?
A. No.
Q. Is it even less likely that you were hacked, someone took a copy of Bitmessage, and distributed it on the dark web?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. Yes.
Q. Is it even less likely that you were hacked, someone took a copy of Bitmessage, distributed that on the dark web, and you’ve never heard about it during your active development of Bitmessage over the past seven years?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. Yes.
Q. Have you ever heard of anyone obtaining a copy of Bitmessage before you publicly released it in November of 2012?
A. No.
Q. Have you ever seen any evidence that Bitmessage was available to anyone prior to November 19, 2012?
A. No.
Q. Besides the messages I’ve shown you today and messages you sent to yourself while testing, have you ever seen a Bitmessage that was purportedly sent or receive prior to November 19, 2012?
A. No.”
<<snip>>
“Q. I’m going to hand you what have been marked as Plaintiff’s Exhibits 7 through 11. They all contain at least a page purporting to be a Bitmessage sent or received prior to November 19, 2012. Do you remember that?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form. And asked and answered.
A. I remember seeing this exhibit earlier, yes.
Q. Do you remember testifying that Bitmessages — that the printouts purported to be Bitmessages prior to November 19, 2012, were forged?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. Yes.
Q. Do you still believe they are forgeries?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. Yes.
Q. Are you as certain as you could possibly be that they are forgeries?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. Yes.
Q. Has anything Mr. Kass asked you today changed your opinion as to the nature of those documents?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. Is he Mr. Kass?
Q. Yes.
A. No.
Q. Has anything he’s shown you today changed your opinion about those documents?
MR. KASS: Objection to the form.
A. No.”
And with all this said and done, we can add another hack anecdote to the long, long list of Craig Wright related hacks. But the best is yet to come, so please keep reading!
2013–2015: The ATO Tax Fraud
The 2013–2015 era (especially after April 2013, the month that Dave Kleiman died) is where Craig Wright starts using Bitcoin as a scam tool to try defraud the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Craig was trying to obtain millions of Australian dollars in tax refunds, by way of filing a plethora of fraudulent tax claims: quarterly GST returns, yearly income tax declarations and several R&D tax rebates for non-existing Bitcoin supercomputers and other nonsense. The Faketoshi, The Early Years article series will give you all the insights about these years. But how about ‘hacks’? Yes, you guessed it, Craig Wright used the hack excuse on several occasions again!
And not only Craig Wright. Also his wife Ramona Watts mentioned that in 2014/2015 a lot of hacks were supposedly going on. A little snippet from her deposition on March 19, 2020 in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit:
“Q. Let’s go to the letter. The letter is from June 2014; correct?
A. That is what it says here.
Q. Okay. And it purports to be from Dr. Wright to Miss Uyen; correct?
A. I don’t know. I really don’t know. We had quite a few problems in 2014, we had our computers hacked, our personal computers at home and the computers in the office. So quite frankly, there are lots of e-mails back and forth, even to me, even from me, that were not mine. We discovered that in 2014/2015 I think.”
Let’s lift a few of these ‘the dog ate my homework’ nuggets from the ATO reports, shall we?
The 2014 credit card hack.
The ATO hacked Craig Wright! Or did they?
Just before he fled to the UK at the end of 2015, Craig accused the ATO of hacking his emails. Let’s return to “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 3” for a detailed description of what happened in that timeframe. This hilarious anecdote starts on 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 address at the time, 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 about 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 the coffin of 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’!
So far for Early Years — Part 3. In summary, the ATO did not hack Craig Wright, and their overall findings are best explained with the following quote, found in one of their reports at paragraph 227 about the supercomputers scam.
“the documentation was created by [Craig Wright] in order to fraudulently deceive the ATO and support the false and misleading statements made by [Craig Wright]”
During the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit trial in November 2021, we learned a name from Craig Wright, a person working at the ATO that he accuses of hacking, or fabricating, documents. You’re on the shortlist, Des McMaster!
“Q. Dr. Wright, we’ve also heard you yesterday claim that evidence was fabricated by the Australian government, did we not?
A. No. I said specifically that the government came back and said that there was a breach in the security and that that was pointed out in our forensic report. The government — that was done inside the government site. The government basically said they were hacked.
Q. Dr. Wright, did you say that Des McMaster had fabricated documents?
A. I believe he was involved in that, yes.”
Note that after the conclusion of their inquiries and the release of several reports in 2015 and 2016, the ATO started a criminal investigation relating to Craig Steven Wright, as we learned in June 2020 during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. This investigation is still ongoing as far as we know.
October 27, 2015: Email forgery “CSU ethical hacking class”
On this date, Craig Wright forwards an email forgery backdated to May 22, 2012, to Stefan Matthews and Ramona Watts, his wife.
Forgery? Yes. A clear-cut forgery again, created by Craig Wright’s mass-producing ‘Phony Works Studio’.
Here, in the email, Craig pretends he had a conversation, actually more of a rant with several times ‘fuck’, ‘dick’ and ‘bloody’ sprinkled between the sentences, with Dave Kleiman about, among more subjects, trusts and banking code. However, we do know from the ATO tax fraud inquiry reports that all this didn’t happen, and the material to support this deception to the ATO was fraudulently created by Craig Wright in the 2013–2015 era. It appears here that Craig Wright was rehashing this forgery to deceive Stefan Matthews, with his wife either being pulled into the deception, or being complicit.
What is of interest here, in this email forgery we find the sentence “I am not teaching the ethical hacking class next semester, but rather I am teaching Windows domain management (A subject I know but find boring).”. As such, we can use this forged email as one of the sources to determine that Craig Wright not only had the incentives, but also the skills to create the forgeries that we know from his hands.
On a related sidenote, it would be interesting, in an effort to date this forgery besides mapping out the usual metadata flaws of Craig Wright, to find out when he exactly teached these classes at CSU. For now, I didn’t bother, knowing that the ATO had already determined this email is a forgery.
December 2015: The Wired/Gizmodo reveal
Over the years, Craig Wright has always stated that he was hacked, and in the months leading to the Wired and Gizmodo articles, the hacker supposedly had tried to ‘sell’ a dox package with ‘Craig is Satoshi evidence’.
Craig suspects “5 ex-staffers” of stealing backups, he claims to Robert MacGregor, Calvin Ayre, Stefan Matthews et al on November 21, 2015.
On December 5, 2015 (indeed, three days before the Wired and Gizmodo articles) Craig Wright gives some body to his ex-staff accusations, and mentions three names at the bottom of an email: Karannan, Phillip Montecellio and Brendan Beverage.
At the end of this article, all candidate ‘hackers’ will be gathered in a list.
Online media outlet Fusion had doubts from the start about these hacks however, as they express in their article “Who is the hacker that outed Craig Wright as the creator of Bitcoin? Maybe Craig Wright himself.” Writer Kashmir Hill went the extra mile, and inquired what went on in the months before Wired and Gizmodo published their articles.
On a sidenote, this same article was also published on Splinter.
“On Tuesday, Wired and Gizmodo independently reported that they had finally identified Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency birthed unto the world in 2009 that has minted many millionaires and confused millions of others. They say, based primarily on emails that Wired calls “leaked” and Gizmodo calls “hacked,” that the digital money’s creator is an Australian dude named Craig Wright.
What is almost as interesting as the possibility that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto is how Wright was outed, the result of the work of a very dedicated leaker who may actually be Wright himself.
<<snip>>
Wired says the emails “come from an anonymous source close to Wright” while Gizmodo says they come from someone who worked with Wright who claims to have hacked him. Apparently this person was fast and loose with his leaking, because Wired and Gizmodo were not the only ones to get the leak. After the stories came out Tuesday, New York Times journalist Nathaniel Popper, author of a book about Bitcoin published in May called Digital Gold, chimed in on Twitter. He said he too got an email in October from someone who claimed Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto.
<<snip>>
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.”
April/May 2016: The Failed Signing Sessions
For this section I would like to refer the reader to another article I wrote exactly a year ago:
“The Craig Wright May 2016 Signing Sessions Debacle, In Full Context”.
In summary, in that article you’ll learn how Craig Wright — very likely — hacked Electrum Wallet with one or two lines of code to make fake signings possible on any public Bitcoin address, you’ll learn how Bitcoin Core developers suspected for a little while that Craig Wright hacked Gavin Andresen (but they came back from that idea), and you’ll learn how and why Craig Wright hacked an existing website of the SiliconAngle media outlet to publish his own article that was supposed to support his desperate act of ducking away from proving his Satoshi-ness in May 2016.
It’s probably not a bad read, may I humby add, as it is one of my most read and anticipated articles so far!
2018–2021: The Lost Kleiman v Wright Lawsuit
The Kleiman v Wright case is, as noted before, a treasure box loaded with hack claims and -excuses. For example, during the March 2020 depositions of Craig Wright we can find several instances where Craig brings up the subject of hacking, and being hacked.
The 2015 Twitter Hack
Did we notice Uyen Nguyen being mentioned? Never mind, she was on the shortlist already.
And Craig’s HTC phone, used to obtain a totally fraudulent Statutory Declaration containing the 1Feex — Mt Gox hack! — and 16cou — signed “Craig is a liar and a fraud.” — Bitcoin public addresses on October 11, 2013, was used to hack his email we learn on March 18, 2020.
“The HTC phone was actually a company phone that was run by a number of people in the system engineering department. It was designed to have apps that we were developing run on it. I did not realise that after I had given it back to the company, after doing some demonstrations, that I had not wiped it, which would allow people to keep using my e-mail and have access to other such things.”
The 2020 ‘everything had been altered because ex-staff and other people have been hacking my computers five years ago’ claim
“I have lots of reasons to think that EVERYTHING had been altered.”
That goes for many people, Craig. That goes for many people, in and outside court rooms. They all know that EVERYTHING had been altered. By you, is the consensus.
December 19, 2019: The ‘Hack Evidence’ By Craig’s Counsel
During the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, this is the best that Craig’s counsel could come up with when it comes to ‘hack evidence’: because Wired and Gizmodo stated in their articles that they had received their information from someone who represented himself as a hacker.
Quote taken from a Discovery Hearing Proceeding on December 18, 2019.
“And I do want to just take this moment to point out that while plaintiffs have brought up many times that there’s absolutely no evidence of a hack, this hack is public knowledge. There are two articles online that anybody could view from Wired and Gizmodo that contain private e-mails from Dr. Wright with former counsel, and those e-mails specifically state that — and in the — the articles specifically state they received these documents from a hacker.”
That settles it then, right? No, of course not. Wired and Gizmodo, as far as we know at least, did no forensic inquiry about the person(s) sending them the dox package to confirm it was indeed a hacker, and since many, like Splinter’s journalist Kashmir Hill, and that includes the undersigned, suspect that it was actually Craig Wright himself shopping around with the dox package.
That package contained several forgeries with Craig Wright’s fingerprints on them, and it is highly likely that it was Craig Wright falsely representing himself as a hacker to several media, including Wired and Gizmodo. And that representation was uncritically taken at face value by Wired and Gizmodo(*).
(*) “Wired says the emails “come from an anonymous source close to Wright” while Gizmodo says they come from someone who worked with Wright who claims to have hacked him.” — Kashmir Hill, Splinter
To conclude, the argument of Craig’s counsel falls under ‘hearsay’, which is evidence with hardly any legal merit. And talking about hearsay… It appears that in 2013, when Jamie Wilson worked with Craig Wright to set up Hotwire, Craig was not being hacked (yet).
“Q. Okay. Mr. Wilson, did Craig ever tell you that his e-mails were hacked?
A. No.
Q. Did he ever tell you his company documents were hacked?
A. No.”
Now that we’re on the hearsay subject anyway, let’s hear Jimmy Nguyen, for many years a close buddy to Craig Wright, but who recently announced to leave the BSV community to continue his career elsewhere.
May 2020: Jimmy Nguyen About Craig Being Hacked
An important element of Craig Wright’s Satoshi cosplay is spreading hearsay. This typical con man trick is growing fast in importance lately for Craig, as after many years of consistently debunked material, both digital and physical, that he depended upon to prove his ‘Satoshi-ness’, there’s hardly anything left to show off with anymore. So in recent years, Craig has been rallying the hearsay troops with Calvin Ayre, his uncle Donald Lynam, his business friend Stefan Matthews, and others that Craig is trying tirelessly to add to the list.
Jimmy Nguyen — who desperately tried to duck and hide for his subpoenaed involvement in the Kleiman lawsuit early 2020, but who ultimately failed in that effort — is another fine example of how Craig Wright is talking through the mouth of others, in this case his friend and ex-nChain colleague. Let’s hear it what Jimmy had to say during his deposition in the Kleiman v Wright case on May 26, 2020 about Craig being hacked.
“Q. When is the first time you heard that Dr. Wright talk about the hacks?
A. I think I may have heard about that before the lawsuit was filed.
Q. What exactly did he say the hacker did?
A. I don’t recall him discussing in detail at the time. I remember him saying that he’s had a number of problems with disgruntled then current or former employees of his Australian companies who would he believed get access to their I.T. systems and change documents or create documents that they discovered later that I remember him saying this, you know, affected or learned about it in the context of some of the battles he had with the Australian Tax Office and I’m trying to remember if he ever told me whether there was any hack attempts from people outside or he didn’t have a relationship with the company. I seem to remember having a conversation about that but I do not remember the specifics.
Q. Did he give you any specific examples of specific documents that had been hacked?
A. Well, I guess I would characterize it this way. I don’t think documents were hacked. I think he said his computer systems, his companies had been hacked meaning someone accessed them without authorization and changed documents, data or added things or created things that weren’t otherwise supposed to be there. I think he mentioned that someone created the e-mails or altered e-mails and some other documents but I don’t recall him telling me anything more specific than that.
Q. Did he ever give you examples of which e-mails had been altered?
A. Not that I can recall.
Q. Did you ever see any evidence to corroborate this hacking story beyond Dr. Wright’s telling you that it’s happened?
A. Did I see any evidence to corroborate it? I didn’t ask for any.
Q. So you didn’t see any evidence to corroborate it beyond Dr. Wright’s words that it happened?
A. No, other than his wife Ramona telling me the same thing.
Q. Craig and Ramona, anyone else?
A. Not that I can recall.
Q. Did you ever ask him why these hackers that were disgruntled employees were making changes to documents that supported his position in front of the Australian Tax Office?
A. I don’t know that whatever changes were made supported his position with the Australian Tax Office. I didn’t know the details of what was changed or not changed or added or not added.
Q. Did he tell you that the lawyers acting for his Australian companies quit because they couldn’t — stopped working for his companies because there were changes done to documents that supported his position to the Australian Tax Office?
A. No.”
Ira’s counsel is referring here to Andrew Sommer of Clayton Utz lawyers, who terminated all engagements with Craig Wright and his companies in July 2015 after the discovery of a significant amount of Craig Wright forgeries. Let’s take a moment to find out what exactly happened with this “hack”.
Taken from “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 3”.
“I also believe that this information should be provided to Stefan Matthews and Rob Macgregor as a matter of urgency.” — Andrew Sommer
Dear reader, you think Ramona Ang or Craig Wright ever provided “this information to Stefan Matthews and Rob Macgregor as a matter of urgency”?
“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.” — Andrew Sommer again
And so it happened:
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:
Now let’s go back to Jimmy Nguyen’s deposition.
“Q. Did you ever discuss this hack with Rivero, Mestre?
A. I don’t think the topic came up. I don’t recall any detailed discussions about it.
Q. Have you ever communicated about in this lawsuit with Ramona Watts?
A. Yes.
Q. What did she say about the lawsuit?
A. We haven’t had extensive conversations about it. Discussed the fact that, you know, it’s happening and that it’s taking up significant amounts of time. Discussed things such as how it affects scheduling for events or business trips Craig needs to do and scheduling their family needs to do. She’s also discussed with me she thinks the lawsuit is unfounded and that she thinks the lawsuit does not have any merit.
Q. Were you at the hearing where Judge Reinhart issued his sanctions order?
A. I was at the hearing, an evidentiary hearing. I don’t think I was at a hearing where an order was issued.
Q. Did you review the — strike that. Are you aware that in Judge Reinhart’s order which was affirmed — his factual findings were affirmed by Judge Bloom he found that and I quote “I completely reject Dr. Wright’s testimony about the alleged Tulip Trust, the alleged encrypted file and his alleged inability to identify his Bitcoin holdings.”?
A. What is the question?
Q. Do you recall reading that or hearing about that finding of Judge Reinhart?
A. I do.”
I couldn’t help extending the Jimmy Nguyen interview a little with the Reinhart quote, because that’s where Craig Wright’s utter lack of credibility leads to; a complete rejection of *all* of his inconceivable statements. This includes his false hack claims that are not supported by any evidence. And to be clear: Jimmy Nguyen did not see any evidence of any hacks either, he only repeated what Craig Wright told him that Jimmy accepted on faith.
In legalese, that is called hearsay.
The 2020 ‘Ira Kleiman And Jamie Wilson Hacked Me’ Conspiracy
The hilarious suggestion that Jamie Wilson hacked Craig is, as far as I know, rooted in a March 18, 2020 deposition of Craig Wright in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Initially, Craig insinuates that Ira Kleiman was a hacker, forger and allround con man, that had cooperated with a mysterious and anonymous member of his ex-staff that Craig had fired… Who could that be?
“Q. Did Dave Kleiman have anything to do with the deal you struck with Mark Ferrier and MJF Mining Services?
A. The deal that I ended up going through sort of happened after Dave Kleiman died.
Q. That was not what I asked. I just asked if Dave Kleiman had anything to do with that deal?
A. Are you asking whether beyond the grave somehow he managed to have a seance with someone? I don’t believe in seances.
Q. So the answer is no.
A. Unless you believe in them, I don’t believe he can.
Q. So unless Dave Kleiman communicated beyond the grave he did not have anything to do with these deals; is that an accurate statement?
A. Yes.
Q. Did MJF Mining Services ever acknowledge receipt of private keys to you?
A. They announced they had received it. It was not directly to MJF Mining, it was through accounts function as agent, so I am not sure what was received to them directly and what was given to other parties.
Q. Did MJF Mining — strike that. Was MJF Mining Services associated with Mark Ferrier?
A. Yes, unfortunately.
Q. Did Mark Ferrier send you Core Banking software?
A. No, Mark Ferrier did not send me Core Banking software.
Q. Did Mark Ferrier arrange for you to receive Core Banking software?
A. Yes, Mark Ferrier acted as an agent for other parties who gave me source code to Islamic banking software.
Q. Did you pay for that software?
A. Yes, I paid for that software.
Q. What form of remuneration did you provide for that software?
A. I made an exchange with a group, a Saudi group, to exchange a large amount of Bitcoin for copies of software.
Q. Did you buy anything else from Mr. Ferrier, MJF Mining or any other company as part of that transaction?
A. I attempted to buy something else.
Q. What is the total remuneration that you paid for these things?
A. The Core Banking software or the things that were not delivered?
Q. Why don’t you break it down. First, for the Core Banking software.
A. I don’t know. It will be in the company accounts. More than that, I have no idea.
Q. What about for the other things that you purchased?
A. I know it was in the tens of millions of dollars. There were transfers of gold that never occurred. Mark Ferrier was meant to be mining a mine for Pain, an Australian listed mining company. Unfortunately, it turns out Mr. Ferrier duped a lot of people and never appeared in the contract with Pain. I had no third party rights, so nothing occurred there. I don’t remember the value. There was a lawsuit. Unfortunately, Mr. Ferrier fled overseas so I have not tracked how much that is actually worth. The other was SCADA software. The SCADA software was from Siemens. We were given a complete set of all Siemens software, all control software and all management software, including for power plants and other global operations.
Q. What is the total remuneration that you paid for all of these things?
10 A. I don’t know. You would have to look at the accounts.
Q. Did you and Dave arrange for the sale of 500,000 Bitcoin to have access to Core Banking software?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
A. As I said, Dave was dead.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Did you tell Ira that Dave arranged for the — strike that. Did you tell Ira that you and Dave arranged for the sale of 500,000 Bitcoins to have access to Core Banking software?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
A. It was not 500,000, off the top of my head, for Core Banking software. I would need to look at the amounts.
MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. I just asked if you told Ira that you arranged for the sale of 500,000 BTC so that you could have access to Core Banking software, not whether the amount was correct. Let me rephrase so you can hear clearly the question. Dr. Wright, did you tell Ira that you and Dave arranged for the sale of around 500,000 BTC so that you could have access to Core Banking software?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form. Dr. Wright, answer that question.
A. No, but I do know that Mr. Kleiman has created documents and sent them around saying that.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, I am going to share with you what you have produced in this litigation as Defense 00119167. Can you let me know when that is up on the screen?
(Exhibit Defense 00119167 referred to)
A. That is up on the screen.
Q. Do you recognise this as a printout of an e-mail that purports to be from you to Ira Kleiman, with a cc to Andrew Sommer?
A. No, I did not. There are a number of problems with this. Where I said that unless there is something emotionally scarring or whatever else I don’t remember dates, this happens to be an emotionally scarring date. On 23rd August, [note that Craig Wright means April here, August is very likely a court transcript error] this was just before the Tuesday following where we told the staff, on this particular day for the entire day I had been in communications with McGrathNicol, the external auditors that we appointed over Hotwire, KPMG and other entities. Basically, we had decided to appoint external parties to manage Hotwire due to problems that we had, so we were renegotiating contracts. We were with lawyers and other parties. The entire process of spending a day with everything there, going through and having to close — well, not close but place not into liquidation, as you said, but into external administration the company and restructure was massively scarring, I would say, mentally for me. I remember the day and unfortunately there was a day when I did not have any e-mails sent. I did not send a single e-mail on 23rd April [2014] and there are public records that attest that I was in these meetings.
Q. Dr. Wright, is it your position then that you did not send this e-mail?
A. It is my position that Mr. Kleiman has been making up documents and that he has worked with other people that I fired that have been doing things like signing my signature to raise money and that Mr. Kleiman has fabricated quite a lot and then said things that are taken from machines that I was no longer involved with that he would have known have been fabricated, yes.
Q. I want to break that down. The first is, just so the records is clear, it is your testimony that this is not an e-mail you sent, correct?
A. My testimony with the Craig S. Wright A, whatever that says, is that Ira Kleiman has been defrauding everyone, and he can sue me for defamation on this one, because I think he is a con man.
Q. Dr. Wright, please just answer the question I am asking. I really don’t want to have to ask the court for more time. I really want to finish this but if you don’t answer the question it is going to take a lot longer.
A. I did answer the question.
Q. Is it your testimony that this document — —
MR. RIVERO: I — —
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Mr. Rivero let me finish the question and then you will have opportunity to object. Dr. Wright, it is your testimony that this e-mail was not sent by you?
MR. RIVERO: Dr. Wright, let me speak. Dr. Wright, please answer that question so we can proceed.
A. It is my testimony that this is a fraudulently fabricated document involving Ira and other people that I was not involved in the sending of.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Can you read for me the first two sentences of this e-mail that purports to be from you?
A. I can read the fabricated document, saying: “I have sold all of the BTC that I plan to sell now. In doing what we wanted to do, Dave and I arranged for the sale or around 500,000 BTC so that we could have access to Core Banking software.
Q. Dr. Wright, you said that Ira Kleiman has fabricated this e-mail — strike that. Do you believe Ira Kleiman has fabricated this e-mail?
MR. RIVERO: Objection. Asked and answered.
A. I believe that Ira Kleiman worked with other people who were fired from my organisation to fabricate this and many other documents. I believe that he knew that the document dates that were changed in 2014 would have been changed, that the reason — that the administration I told you about where people are talking about e-mail headers and things like that changing on that date and being forensically differed, that was because we had gone through an administration and had to rebuild all the servers and import e-mails to a new domain being that Hotwire was not our domain anymore because it was under external administration and we had to set up a new exchange server. I believe that the only reason all of those documents purporting to be my forged documents that can be demonstrated to be involved with the administration and the changes of re-scanning are all because Mr. Kleiman and other people that used to work for me worked basically to take money. That he is a con man, a fraud and he is making up things for this court in order to steal or attempt to steal funds. That is my testimony.
Q. What evidence do you have — —
MR. CAIN: We need to take a break quite shortly because the SD card for the video machine is going to run out.
MR. FREEDMAN: How much time do we have?
MR. CAIN: Five minutes.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Perfect. Dr. Wright, what evidence do you have that Ira Kleiman fabricated this e-mail?
A. I have things that I have discussed with my solicitors, I have the fact that I was not available or sending e-mails on that day, I have the evidence that my machines were compromised, I have the evidence that the machines were shut down and rebuilt, I have the public records to do with the administration of the companies, I have testimony of other people, I have forensic analysis of some of the signatures proving that it was not me who signed them but other people, I have other documents. Unfortunately what I don’t have, because your side has not put any of the required evidence in, are original documents from Mr. Kleiman that he was required under discovery to provide.
Q. Dr. Wright, what evidence do you have that specifically links Ira Kleiman to these documents?
MR. RIVERO: Hold on. Objection. Asked and answered. Dr. Wright, just be careful not to go into any discussions with counsel anywhere, including us, including London. Go ahead and answer.
A. I cannot answer that without going into discussions with counsel as counsel were the people running and managing all the forensic personnel.
MR. FREEDMAN: Why don’t we take that break now, you can switch up your SD card and we’ll flag this and come back to it.
(Recess at 1.58 p.m. to 2.29 p.m.)”
So after this deposition, Ira Kleiman’s counsel had some of these emails checked (among them DEFAUS_00119167, the long email from Craig Wright to Ira Kleiman on April 23, 2014 shown earlier) by Forensic Linguist Robert A. Leonard, and unsurprisingly, Ira Kleiman is not involved in writing or forging any of these emails, including DEFAUS_00119167.
According to Leonard, Craig “busted-again” Wright wrote all of them.
After this slam dunk, Craig kept quiet about Ira Kleiman for approximately a year and a half. The silence on this subject was broken in Craig Wright’s private Slack room in early September 2021. And the dedicated followers of Craig Wright are treated to the next plot twist in the Faketoshi saga! The narrative had now changed to Ira apparently being accused of hacking Craig Wright’s business servers and assembling the dox package for Wired and Gizmodo!
Let’s read what Craig penned down for his followers in his Slack room on September 2, 2021.
“Has nobody worked out who really was the one who benefited most by the Wired/Gizmodo outing/Doxing? A person who had confidential information and wanted more. A person who talked to Core members to aide his scam with their complicity… A person who started planning a law suit in 2014 as he was not happy with tens of millions of USD nor having to wait to cash in shares. A person who never visited his brother, bit is happy to fabricate stories and paint me negatively in the media, while avoiding it himself… Only one person had all the material in the form Wired received it. That person knew I had several degrees and doctorate, but worked with others like Greggles knowing that I was going to hide it the media hit. As I unfortunately did. MM: Ira Kleiman? The one and only Web manipulator and affiliate marketing expert. The one who seeds search engines with fake news for a career
CSW
Sep 2, 2021”
An astute reader might ask: how would Ira Kleiman have obtained “all the material in the form Wired received it”? This is where Craig Wright’s counsel came to the rescue, of course fully instructed by Craig. During the Kleiman v Wright trial in Miami in November 2021 we learned the following about an IP address found in several Craig-made forgeries: that IP address is associated with Wooloowin, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia.
Guess who’s company CryptoLoc was located close to Wooloowin? Here is a transcript extract from the Day 10 (November 16, 2021) of the trial, where forensic expert Dr. Edman is being questioned about the Craig-made forgeries:
“Q. Do you know, sir, whether or not Brisbane, Australia, is more than a thousand kilometers away from Sydney, Australia?
A. I do not.
Q. Do you know whether Wooloowin is a suburb of Brisbane?
A. I do not.
Q. Do you know whether Jamie Wilson lived in the suburb named Wooloowin?
A. I do not.
Q. And you don’t know whether Dr. Wright lived in Sydney?
A. I do not.
Q. You didn’t check any of this?
A. No. Again, I was only relying on sort of the general region, not necessarily the city.”
Indeed, Jamie Wilson can, with a little stretch, be attached to the IP address found in the forgeries too.
However, during the same questioning, we learned that Craig Wright’s mother can be attached to the IP address too, and she lives seven miles closer (or only 1/3rd of the distance from Jamie Wilson) to Wooloowin.
“BY MR. ROCHE:
Q. Dr. Edman, are you aware that Brisbane, Australia, is less than four miles away from Wooloowin, Australia?
MR. RIVERO: Objection, Your Honor. It’s leading, although I’ll stipulate that Wooloowin is a suburb of Brisbane.
THE COURT: You want to accept that stipulation?
MR. ROCHE: That works for me.
THE COURT: All right. Then let’s continue.
BY MR. ROCHE:
Q. Are you aware that the Defendant’s mother lives in Brisbane, Australia, which we’ve just stipulated is less than four miles away from Wooloowin, Australia?
A. I am not.”
Once they started to connect the Wooloowin dots and the Brisbane breadcrumbs that Craig had planted, CoinGeek, a BSV-and-Craig-Wright-friendly media outlet run by Craig’s sugar daddy Calvin Ayre, was quick to turn Craig’s new conspiracy theories and fanciful accusations into an outrageous new Faketoshi fantasy story. There was, of course, no mention of the possibility of Craig Wright’s mother creating the forgeries for her son to become world famous as an ever-failing Satoshi Nakamoto claimant!
Quotes from the CoinGeek article:
“So, even going into the trial, the idea that the record was littered with documents and emails forged by Dr. Wright didn’t make sense. Add to that the fact that the most definitive thing anyone can say about any of the apparent forgeries on the record relates to the 2008 RCBJR email: that whoever made that forgery, it could not have been Dr. Wright.
As the person with hundreds of billions to gain from demonstrating that Dr. Wright was both his brother’s business partner and a compulsive liar, Ira Kleiman is an obvious candidate. The aforementioned pre-trial strategy of preventing Wright from complaining about forgeries certainly indicates that the plaintiffs were well aware that some of their evidence are of questionable authenticity.
Ira isn’t much of a computer expert, however, so if he was forging documents, he at the very least was using someone else to do it.
Jamie Wilson had means, motive and opportunity
There is another suspect worth considering: Jamie Wilson, witness in Kleiman v Wright and former CFO to Dr. Wright.
Remember the testimony by Dr. Edman, presented as part of the plaintiff’s case, which revealed that at least some forgeries were done by an IP based in Wooloowin, Brisbane? Wilson’s company, Cryptoloc, is just an 11-minute drive from Wooloowin.
Further, though a former accountant, Wilson is technologically competent: he runs a successful cryptographic security company, Cryptoloc, so it’s fair to say his competency to create convincing digital forgeries exceeds that of Ira Kleiman.
All of this is circumstantially damning by itself, but a close look into the relationship between Dr. Wright and Jamie Wilson reveals that Wilson had plenty of motivation to implicate Wright in what is said to be most valuable robbery in history.
Jamie Wilson is Dr. Wright’s old chief financial officer, and his testimony formed a curious part of the plaintiff’s case: he appeared to be brought on to opine about the quality of Wright’s various company books, but admitted under oath he’d never seen them in more than a year he supposedly spent serving as CFO. He complained he was never paid for his work with Dr. Wright, but then admitted under oath that no one had ever agreed to pay him in the first place.”
[Here is where I feel the urgent need to interrupt, as the cringe starts itching in places where the narrator cannot reach. The CoinGeek outlet is well known for telling half-truths and straight-out lies, and here is one such occasion. Please allow the undersigned to set the record straight here.
Jamie Wilson NEVER complained he wasn’t paid a salary, on the contrary, he didn’t even complain when his shares were taken back from him when he resigned. For the record, Craig Wright had registered Jamie Wilson in his payroll administration for AU$150,000 per year. Unfortunately, Craig never paid a penny to ANY of his personnel, Jamie included.
What Jamie Wilson rightfully complained about was the fact that his substantial investment of out-of-pocket expenses, which was a loan to Craig Wright to help Hotwire startup in 2013, was never reimbursed to him.
This is what Jamie Wilson had to say on the matter in his November 8, 2019 deposition in the Kleiman v Wright case, when discussing a Hotwire Employee Remuneration document:
“BY MR. PASCHAL:
Q. So, I’m showing you an employee remuneration.
A. Yes.
Q. But you are familiar with this document, correct?
A. Yes, I am.
Q. Have you done this — how are you familiar with this document?
A. The reason for it is that I never got paid, never received a cent. And as I have stated to the Australia Taxation Office, I never received any money whatsoever from Craig Wright and why should I have to pay tax.
Q. Okay.
A. So, I got a tax bill for money I never received.
Q. So, going to my question, that is how you remember a document like this?
A. Yes.
Q. Okay. So, I want to just go through this with you. Your name is on here under Employee, right?
A. Yes.
Q. And it does say Start Date: August 1, 2013, correct?
A. Yes.
[note that Jamie will correct this a bit later during the deposition, as dates are written differently between USA (where the lawyer asking the questions resides) and Australia (where Jamie Wilson resides)]
Q. Then it says October 11, 2013, Termination, right?
A. Correct.
Q. That is when you resigned?
A. Yes.
Q. You could take a second. But can you look at Annual Salary?
A. Yes.
Q. And you could look at them all. Are you the second highest paid person for this company?
MR. FREEDMAN: Objection, form.
THE WITNESS: Yes.
BY MR. PASCHAL:
Q. And how many employees are there on that list? More than 12?
A. Yes.
Q. More than 14?
A. Yes.
Q. So it is a significant amount of employees for this company? Correct?
A. Yes.
Q. And you are the second highest paid person?
A. Yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Objection to form.
BY MR. PASCHAL:
Q. And you started in August of 2013, right?
A. No, no. I didn’t. If you have a look it was January, 8 of January, 2013. So that Christmas party that we asked before —
Q. Hold on, go ahead.
A. That would have been in December. So that does work out.
Q. So, the date on this, this goes, the date then the month then the year?
A. Yes.
Q. So, why is your resignation say here then November 10, 2013, if you resigned in October?
A. That would have been Craig or who, or his bookkeeper who looked after the accounts. I would not have processed my own termination pay because I never received the payment.
Q. Okay. But you were scheduled to be one of the highest employees, paid employees of this company, correct?
A. Yes.
Q. So, it is January, you are saying that you were employed January 8th of 2013.
A. Yes.
Q. And how many people started the company, well I guess with you?
A. Well, Ramona Watts. His wife. Myself and Craig.
Q. Okay.
A. And then I would live in Brisbane; Craig lives in Sydney. All of the business was done out of Sydney. I was flying back and forward. Craig was then on-boarding other people around him to start up Hotwire PE.
Q. Okay. So, for nine months — strike that. So in April Dave dies?
A. Yes.
Q. You stay on with Hotwire in May, right?
A. Yes.
Q. You stay on in June, right? You stay on in July. You stay on all of the way until October or November?
A. 23rd of October my resignation.
Q. Okay.”
<snip>>
“Q. Okay. And so, did you, are there any e-mails or documents or, did you have any communications where you expressed concerns that you weren’t doing anything for the seven-month period?
A. There was no work to be done. As in there was nothing from the accounting point because the bookkeeper was there. So a lot of mine was strategy with Craig and sitting and understanding, okay, how do we actually structure this to be able to move forward.
Q. So, Hotwire agreed to make you the second highest paid employee and you did nothing for seven months?
A. I never got a cent anyway.
Q. Okay.
A. But I still had to pay tax on the money. And if you go and have a look at the records, I also put the down deposit down for the rental property that Craig never paid me back as well. And all of the travel back and forward out of Sydney and accommodation expense and expenditure was never reimbursed as well.
Q. Are you upset about that?
A. I think it is unethical.
Q. Okay.
A. You would do the right thing. If you are delivering and you are working and doing your duties, and your jobs and you want to be part of a project, well then you should pay.
Q. Were you monitoring this case? Monitoring?
A. No. It actually was Steve Lipke who made me aware of it.
Q. And then you reached out and congratulated Mr. Freedman?
A. Yes, I did. And the same reason I never got paid, that team down in Sydney did not get paid. They were loaning money off family and loved ones to be able to afford to pay their rent and keep afloat. They were in quite a state. And still have not recovered.
Q. And you said that when you were, you resigned your shares were just taken from you, right?
A. That’s correct.
Q. How did you feel about that?
A. No, acceptable. I never argued. I didn’t dispute. I, I was only wanting what I was entitled to and that was the money, the physical cash that I was out of pocket with. But then the lawyers got involved down in Sydney as part of the administration, and said no, that is an individual matter for Craig. We are not paying you anything.
Q. And, were any other the lawyers that you spoke with other than Mr. Freedman?
A. No.
Q. You said the ATO is asking you to pay taxes on income that you would have made at Hotwire, right?
A. That’s correct.
Q. But you are saying you did not make income —
A. I did not receive one cent. And you can go through all the bank accounts and you will notice that I never received one. It was only me sending money to Craig and never being reimbursed.
Q. And in January did you complain that you hadn’t been paid your salary?
A. In January?
Q. Of 2013.
A. No.
Q. And in February of 2013, did you complain that you hadn’t received your salary?
A. To be honest I didn’t expect to receive a salary. And I didn’t even, wasn’t aware of the Document 20, this here, that I believe is what you received from the administrators, of when they were looking after and winding up the company. That’s the only way, reason I’ve got knowledge of it as well. Prior to that it was with the payment summary that came in, and the ATO said I received money and I said no, I didn’t. But, that is how this documentation also was supplied to me.
Q. Okay.
A. So, no, I didn’t expect to receive any money. Otherwise it would be strange if I turned around and said no I didn’t take any money.
Q. Okay. So, your payment, what was your payment for being CFO? What was your expected payment? What, were you getting out of being CFO.
A. It was supposed to be an annual salary of what is here, 150. But it never commenced. But, I wasn’t worried anyway. The issue is, I wasn’t concerned, because we were in the stages of doing a setup, a startup.
Q. Okay.
A. During that period of time, I didn’t understand the whole, you know, the Bitcoin, the wallets, and how much money. So, I had to get all of that training. So, I was happy to turn around and spend the time and learning, purely because of my history with Craig, and being an advisory board member of YDF and the relationship there. So that’s why I was more than happy to turn around and wear it. Once the companies got money, then I would get paid but then my duties would increase. But we never got there.”]
Back to the ConGeek, sorry CoinGeek I mean, article.
“Maybe most importantly, Wilson testified that he quit in 2013, while Dr. Wright testified that Wilson was fired. Wright’s story is at least backed up by writings from as early as 2020, where he mentions that around the time Wilson exited the business, he was caught trying to steal and sell Wright’s intellectual property.
[Aaand… another narrator’s cut: backed up by writings in June 2019 (“Jamie disappeared for weeks in 2013 without telling us any real details. We then found he had been in New York making a deal. What I do know is that the deal was to sell the assets and company. I have no idea who the deal was going to be made with, although I do know it was with people in New York. Jamie had come to an agreement to sell my bitcoin and my intellectual property, and all he needed to do was get me to sign. Not a hope in hell.”) and May 2020 (“Mr Jamie Wilson, for instance, in October 2013, tried to sell assets of intellectual property and bitcoin belonging to myself and the company to a group in New York. He also forged my signature multiple times, including in the assignment of certain intellectual property, that he says I gave to him for free.”) from Craig Wright himself, who only repeated this false story of having fired Jamie Wilson because of IP theft during his deposition.]
That’s right: the person who lives and works just 11 minutes from the suburb proven to be the location where the much-discussed forgeries took place was fired by Wright years ago for stealing intellectual property.”
But in the end, did the judges in the Kleiman v Wright case buy all this hack nonsense from our cosplayer? No, unsurprisingly, they didn’t. First, let’s hear Magistrate Judge Reinhart on Craig Wright in August 2019.
“During his testimony, Dr. Wright’s demeanor did not impress me as someone who was telling the truth. When it was favorable to him, Dr. Wright appeared to have an excellent memory and a scrupulous attention to detail. Otherwise, Dr. Wright was belligerent and evasive. He did not directly and clearly respond to questions. He quibbled about irrelevant technicalities. When confronted with evidence indicating that certain documents had been fabricated or altered, he became extremely defensive, tried to sidestep questioning, and ultimately made vague comments about his systems being hacked and others having access to his computers. None of these excuses were corroborated by other evidence.”
Sources for the image mockup above:
* CourtListener (Exhibit)
* Reddit
* CourtListener (Notice Of Withdrawing Exhibit)
For those who want to know the full story of that Craig made forgery above, an email from Dave ‘Klieman’ that was quickly withdrawn by Craig when it was figured out by a Reddit user named ‘Contrarian’ that it was indeed a Craig-made sloppy forgery, here is how this incident was discussed in court during a Motion Hearing before Federal Judge Bloom on July 10, 2019. Of course, a hack comes up as an excuse!
“However, if the Court wanted to go further, the initial email was filed by Dr. Wright. And it wasn’t until the public outcry — you know, Your Honor, the fact is this case is highly watched by the media and the cryptocurrency community, and they watch what’s going on. There’s an interest in the case for a variety of different reasons. And the filings are dissected at times by various members of the public. Dr. Wright filed this email with no intention of saying anything about the fact that he knew it was a forgery. The public exposed it as a fraud. And hours after the public had exposed it as a fraud, and it went viral on news sites, on Reddit, on Twitter, Dr. Wright withdrew the exhibit because he could not verify the time frame in which it was sent. Now, again, this was just another pattern of Dr. Wright saying one thing and then pivoting again. But the Plaintiffs have laid out in their original motion how that document really was forged. And not only was it forged, but the basis of that forgery was an email Dr. Wright sent from himself to himself six minutes before he created the PDF of that email. And then, Dr. Edman has gone through how he has changed the text from Craig Wright to Craig Wright to be Dave Ira Kleiman to Uyen Nguyen. And then he changed the time period in which it was sent from 2014 back to December of 2012. Of course, he also changed from it being from Craig Wright to Craig Wright to being to Dave Kleiman. And in so doing, misspelled “Kleiman.” There’s no way Dave Kleiman misspelled his own name. And then, of course, he dropped the PGP signature into the bottom of the email, which was meant to kind of be the finishing touch in the forgery because everybody knows ncryption can’t be beat, except it turns out what Dr. Wright didn’t know is that PGP signatures contain hidden time stamps. And again, the Internet was the one that originally came up with this, but they demonstrated it and it was verified by Dr. Edman and sworn to in an affidavit to this Court, that — you know, I don’t understand all the science behind it. But converting hex to decimal and then identifying the right range, it gives a number, which is then converted from the amount of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970. Turns out the PGP signature was actually created March 12th of 2014, almost a year after Dave Kleiman was dead, and two weeks before Uyen Nguyen had to file her filings in Florida to reinstate W&K. I mean, the timing is just too coincidental. And then the second email Plaintiffs have not yet had Dr. Wright — sorry — Dr. Edman examine, which is the one where Dave Kleiman says: “Oh, thank so much for accepting the directorship.” As the Court is familiar with the transcript, Dr. Wright was confronted with a lot of forged evidence, allegations of forgery. Judge Reinhart has not made a determination yet on that issue. And as part of that analysis, we became more familiar with the modus operandi of the Defendant and Dr. Edman was then able to look again at Exhibit F, which is that second email that says: “Thank you for acting as a director.” And looking at it, has now again submitted last night to the Court showing that, in fact, that document is sourced from the original forged document of Exhibit A that was withdrawn by the Defendant. It contains the same document ID, which is the metadata tag that shows that these documents are revisions of the same document. And Dr. Edman again showed what was changed. The time was changed. And it’s really a powerful thing to look at to see all the characters that were changed. And then he changed the entire body of the email again. And again, when confronted last night with the fact that that email was also a forgery, the Defendant withdraws the exhibit again. It’s just — Dr. Wright just puts up whatever he can. And when it’s forged, he says: “Oh, you know, all right. I’m just going to withdraw it,” or “Oh, somebody hacked me,” or “Oh” — you know, some other ridiculous excuse. So those two emails are really important not just because they are evidence of forgery and they go to credibility, but also because those two emails are the foundation on which all of Uyen Nguyen’s filings are premised. Those are the ones that gave her authority to act for W&K. But those are forgeries, which means there is zero evidence to show Uyen Nguyen had any authority to act for W&K at all. And she didn’t. It was a complete forgery and a fraud.” — Vel Freedman
Amen to that, Mr Freedman. Let’s continue with Magistrate Judge Reinhart.
“Sadly, Dr. Wright does not write on a clean slate. As Judge Bloom recently noted in denying Dr. Wright’s Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings, Dr. Wright has taken directly conflicting factual positions at different times during this litigation. DE 265 at 10 (“[T]he record is replete with instances in which the Defendant has proffered conflicting sworn testimony before this Court.). As discussed below, that behavior continued before me. Dr. Wright has a substantial stake in the outcome of the case. If Plaintiffs succeed on their claims, Dr. Wright stands to lose billions of dollars. That gives him a powerful motive not to identify his bitcoin. As long as the relevant addresses remain secret, he can transfer the bitcoin without the Plaintiffs being able to find them. After all, Bitcoin is an anonymous cybercurrency.
Similarly, Dr. Wright had many reasons not to tell the truth. Most notably, Dr. Wright might want to prevent the Plaintiffs (or others) from finding his Bitcoin trove. Alternatively, there was evidence indicating that relevant documents were altered in or about 2014, when the Australian Tax Office was investigating one of Dr. Wright’s companies. Perhaps Dr. Wright’s testimony here is motivated by certain legal and factual positions he took in the Australian Tax Office investigation and from which he cannot now recede.
There was substantial credible evidence that documents produced by Dr. Wright to support his position in this litigation are fraudulent. There was credible and compelling evidence that documents had been altered. Other documents are contradicted by Dr. Wright’s testimony or declaration. While it is true that there was no direct evidence that Dr. Wright was responsible for alterations or falsification of documents, there is no evidence before the Court that anyone else had a motive to falsify them. As such, there is a strong, and unrebutted, circumstantial inference that Dr. Wright willfully created the fraudulent documents.
One example is the Deed of Trust document for the Tulip Trust. Among the trust assets identified in the purported Deed of Trust creating the Tulip Trust on October 23, 2012, are “All Bitcoin and associated ledger assets transferred into Tulip Trading Ltd by Mr David Kleiman on Friday, 10th June 2011 following transfer to Mr Kleiman by Dr Wright on the 09th June 2011. This incles [sic] the 1,200,111 Bitcoin held under the former arrangement and the attached
conditions.” P. Ex. 9 at 2. Notably absent from the list of trust assets is any encrypted file, software, public or private keys. The Deed of Trust states that the parties forming the Tulip Trust are Wright International Investments Ltd and Tulip Trading Ltd. Id. at 1. There was credible and conclusive evidence at the hearing that Dr. Wright did not control Tulip Trading Ltd. until 2014. P. Exs. 11–14; DE 236 at 88–96. Moreover, computer forensic analysis indicated that the Deed of Trust presented to the Court was backdated. The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists. Combining these facts with my observations of Dr. Wright’s demeanor during his testimony, I find that Dr. Wright’s testimony that this Trust exists was intentionally false (11).
Dr. Wright’s false testimony about the Tulip Trust was part of a sustained and concerted effort to impede discovery into his bitcoin holdings. Start with Dr. Wright’s deceptive and incomplete discovery pleadings. He testified at the evidentiary hearing that at least as early as December 2018 he knew that he could not provide a listing of his bitcoin holdings. Yet, the Court was not told this “fact” until April 18, 2019. I give Dr. Wright the benefit of the doubt that prior to May 14 the Plaintiffs were seeking information that went beyond a list of his bitcoin holdings on December 31, 2013. After the May 14 discovery hearing, however, Dr. Wright was aware that the Court expected him to provide Plaintiffs with sufficient information so those bitcoin holdings could be traced.
Nevertheless, having failed to hold off discovery on legal grounds, after March 14, Dr. Wright changed course and started making affirmative misleading factual statements to the Court. His April 18 Motion argued for the first time, “In 2011, Dr. Wright transferred ownership of all his Bitcoin into a blind trust. Dr. Wright is not a trustee or beneficiary of the blind trust. Nor does Dr. Wright know any of the public addresses which hold any of the bitcoin in the blind trust. Thus, Dr. Wright, does not know and cannot provide any other public addresses.”This pleading was intended to communicate the impression that Dr. Wright had no remaining connection to the bitcoin. It was also intended to create the impression that the bitcoin themselves had been transferred to the trust (12). Dr. Wright almost immediately made irreconcilable statements about the Tulip Trust. The April 18 Motion stated it was a blind trust and he was not a trustee. His sworn declaration three weeks later stated that he is one of the trustees of the Tulip Trust. The trust can hardly be considered “blind” (as represented in the April 18 Motion) if Dr. Wright is one of the trustees. At least one set of these representations about the trust and Dr. Wright’s status as a trustee necessarily is intentionally misleading.
(11) Although I am only required to make this finding by a preponderance of the evidence, I find clear and convincing evidence to support it.
(12) Although the pleading was not verified, it was signed by Dr. Wright’s counsel. By signing the document, they certified that “the allegations and other factual contentions [in the pleading had] evidentiary support.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 11. The sole source for that evidentiary support would have been Dr. Wright, so the Court finds that he provided the information contained in the April 18 Motion.”
And on January 10, 2020 Federal Judge Bloom did not hesitate to confirm the damning findings, including the debunking of Craig’s false hack claims, of Magistrate Judge Reinhart a few months earlier.
“The Court has also reviewed the transcripts from the Evidentiary Hearing held by Judge Reinhart and agrees with his credibility findings relating to Defendant.”
And here we go again. No proof-of-hack, only further destruction of Craig Wright’s overall credibility, in part due to the unsubstantiated hack claims in an attempt to try (and fail) to cover up for the forged evidence.
Craig’s Own Hackers Shortlist
During the course of the Kleiman v Wright trial, we also learn more about the people that are on Craig’s shortlist of hackers. A summary can be found in the December 17, 2019 “Joint Discovery Memorandum”.
I had no idea that Craig was suspecting that “mining pools that predominantly mine BTC” are actively hacking his electronic devices, but I’m going to put them on the shortlist later in this article anyway.
Another interesting appearance on this list is “Twitter handle Contrarian”. But it makes sense, I guess. This Twitter member — who appears to be in real life Ben Plonie, with only 8 followers — disappeared from Twitter after his last tweet on November 9, 2016.
Did Ben Plonie feel the heat of Craig Wright chasing him for the relentless hacks on his electronic devices that he executed in the years before?
We can try to make an educated guess here, looking at Ben’s last tweet.
All fun aside though, this is not Ben Plonie, but no doubt this is supposed to be, here he is again, ‘Reddit handle Contrarian’, who is sometimes thought to be Greg Maxwell, while others think he’s not, but either way, Craig Wright or his counsel clearly messed things up again in their filings.
By the way, dear reader, did you know that Ira Kleiman’s counsel tried, in their May 8, 2020 Omnibus Motion In Limine, to preclude Craig’s unsubstantiated hack claims from trial? Let’s have a look. It contains an impressive summary of many things Craig and hack.
Ira Kleiman’s June 2, 2020 “Reply In Support Of Their Omnibus Motion In Limine” is another doozy.
As an introduction to this doozy, Craig Wright is often accused of not being original and authentic: he is cosplaying, he is plagiarizing, he is stealing, he is lying and serial forging. Basically, Craig is often using other people’s work to claim he wrote, made or invented it. But with the repeated hack excuses in the mix, Craig Wright’s appearance in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit makes for a very unique legal case in the United States jurisprudence:
“There does not appear to be a case with this specific cornucopia of deceit.”
This request by Ira Kleiman’s counsel failed, however. Federal Judge Bloom ruled on November 17, 2020 in her Omnibus Order:
“The Court does not find the relief requested in Plaintiffs’ Motion as to issue #3 to be warranted. It is up to the jury to evaluate the plausibility of Defendant’s hacking claims, to assess the extent of evidence in support of it, and to weigh such evidence (whether it be Defendant’s sole testimony or corroborating evidence) against the rest of the evidence presented. In this regard, the Court notes that Defendant has produced evidence from individuals, including Ira Kleiman, discussing potential hacking of Defendant’s computers. See ECF No. [523–1] (email from Ira Kleiman to Defendant stating that “[t]here is a reporter going around town talking to everyone Dave [Kleiman] knows. He says an anonymous source (disgruntled employee of yours or hacker) provided him with documents between you and Dave [Kleiman].”); ECF No. [523–2] (email from Patrick Paige to Kimon Andreou about Mr. Kleiman’s alleged involvement in Bitcoin and noting that “[w]e’ve been sitting on this since last year after Dave [Kleiman’s] death . . . Didn’t have enough proof until someone hacked [Defendant’s] email”). Therefore, Plaintiffs are incorrect to state that Defendant’s hacking claims have no foundation.
Additionally, the Court rejects the assertion that Plaintiffs are subject to a trial by ambush or allowing Defendant’s alleged “‘hacking’ and forgery gambits to proceed is a threat to the integrity of the [judicial] system.” ECF No. [497] at 17. As Defendant rightly points out, Plaintiffs have probed Defendant’s claims of hacking during discovery, including Defendant’s and Mr. Nguyen’s depositions, ECF Nos. [497–11]; [523–3], and the defense is not newly-asserted. Should Defendant wish to proceed with such a defense, he carries the same risk that all litigants face in a jury trial of needing to put forth a convincing, coherent, and credible claim. Against this backdrop, the adversarial system exists to expose weak defenses, shaky theories, and less-than-credible assertions. Plaintiffs provide no basis to demonstrate that they are prejudiced and unable to prepare for any evidence put forth concerning alleged hacking or forgery. Plaintiffs’ Motion as to issue #3 is denied.”
And here we are going to conclude the Kleiman v Wright case, which has proven to be a treasure trove loaded with evidence of Craig Wright’s shenanigans since he started to use Bitcoin as a scam tool in 2013.
June 8, 2019: Mr. Contrarian, Peter Todd, Greg Maxwell And Adam Back Hacked Me!
These hilarious accusations — of the libelous kind — can be found starting at around 44:40 minutes into the video, during a Q&A session at Oxford University on June 8, 2019.
“ Craig: So I’ve got referenced things that other people referenced, meaning they exist, but they’re going back to 2007. Yet you’ll find nothing in the Wayback Machine before 2015. So the argument is, there are multiple different versions of web pages, uhm, that have existed. Yes, things have been turned off and whatever else. Uhm, that doesn’t mean they were backdated. That is because I didn’t go out to Wired. Wired and Gizmodo were played by a Mr. Contrarian. Mr. Contrarian was sending documents that were stolen from my company and contrary to what people we didn’t talk about our employees or whatever else and as Jimmy knows, I mean we had 45 staff, uhm, in 2013. In the days when no one knew about Bitcoin I had 45 staff in Australia working on Bitcoin projects basically secretly under the radar. And I started talking to a number of people like Peter Todd and Greg Maxwell and Adam Back and the next thing I know is, uhm, I’ve got machines being hacked, uhm, I’ve got files being leaked, altered versions of records going out and around the world and people putting out documents saying they’re from me. This is why court matters. If someone tells you I’ve got an email from Craig Wright and it didn’t come from me and they haven’t proved how they’ve gotten it they don’t have an email from Craig Wright. If they’ve got an email they said came from me they don’t have an email from me, that’s why you have rules of evidence, it’s called hearsay. If someone hands you a document a PDF a printout of an email and says this came from Craig Wright… Why do you believe that? yep that’s what people are doing right now.”
And a few minutes later (around the 48:40 mark), Craig went on to declare:
“Sorry I’m going to court on this. I don’t need to face trolls in rooms, that’s why we have evidence. [Craig stands up] So here’s the thing. Evidence. We have courts. You know what happens when you lie in a court!? You know the maximum penalty in this country for perjury? That’s twenty years. Great! I’m going to be in court, prove it in court. You get to send me to jail for twenty years.”
However, so far not Mr Contrarian, nor Peter Todd, nor Greg Maxwell, nor Adam Back has made a move into that direction. The Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a way better funded organization backed by Block (previously Square) Coinbase, Meta (ex-Facebook), Blockstream and the likes, is a different story, though.
Next up, the most outrageous (and, of course, false) hack claim in Craig Wright’s Bitcoin, or any for that matter, fraud career. Buckle up, and get ready for an Ocean’s Eleven style heist!
February 2020: The Pineapple Hack
First a little background on this nothing short of epic fairy tale hack.
We’ve just seen Judge Reinhart rule “I completely reject Dr. Wright’s testimony about the alleged Tulip Trust”. However, let’s pretend for a moment that the Tulip Trust is real, and that it has not been thoroughly debunked as a bunch of lies supported by a pile of Craig-made forgeries, created from October 2014 onward (please read “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2” about the roots, and destruction, of the Tulip Trust).
Then, let’s remind ourselves that Craig Wright’s imaginary Tulip Trust consists of, according to the latest false narratives at least, two Seychelles companies: Wright International Investments Ltd (holding Craig’s mined-as-Faketoshi bitcoin, an imaginary stash of some 820,000 BTC) and Tulip Trading Ltd (holding the fantasy remains of Craig’s bought bitcoin, some imaginary 110,000 BTC).
Most of you will no doubt remember that in January 2020, Craig handed the so-called Tulip Trust list, which is the list of imaginary bitcoin mined by Craig Wright in 2009–2010, in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit over to plaintiff Ira Kleiman.
A list, Craig claimed, that he had just received from his wife who had in turn received it from not-bonded-courier-but-I-am-lawyer Denis Mayaka from Kenya. That list — also containing the “Shadders Bug” and other flaws — got signed 145 times “Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud” on May 25, 2020, and over the years handfuls of bitcoins from that list started to move around on the Bitcoin network.
And it wasn’t Craig himself signing, nor was he moving the coins. As he had no access to these bitcoin, he admitted few days after handing over the — obviously fake — Tulip Trust list.
However, the imaginary Tulip Trust doesn’t have access to any of the imaginary bitcoin either, Craig Wright admitted in another lawsuit: Tulip Trust (represented by his wife Ramona Ang) v Ira Kleiman. In this lawsuit, Craig claims that Dave Kleiman’s W&K company held these imaginary bitcoin (note that this stash of bitcoin is only the imaginary mined bitcoin, which, according to Craig, Dave Kleiman helped hide away from Craig in 2011) “for the benefit of Craig Wright R&D, predecessor-in-interest to the Tulip Trust”.
But lo and behold, Craig claimed that all of the documents and electronic data of W&K had been “systematically destroyed” by Ira Kleiman after his brother Dave Kleiman died in April 2013. So there you have it, the reason why Craig’s wife Ramona Ang sued Ira Kleiman in April 2021.
Now, with the imaginary mined bitcoin stash covered under the destruction of Dave Kleiman’s hard drives, there’s still another imaginary, unaccessible 110,000 BTC in the imaginary Tulip Trust that needs to be addressed.
Of course, amother hack!
Let’s bring in the umpteenth hack of the self-proclaimed ‘world’s most accredited cybersecurity expert’. Immediately after the May 25, 2020 signings labeling Craig Wright as a “liar and a fraud” from the Tulip Trust list forgery mentioned earlier, Craig quickly tried to divert the audience’ attention to the next false hack story.
It started in June 2020 with a tweet by Samson Mow (then working as CSO for Blockstream, now involved with Jan3, who’s mission it is to accelerate hyperbitcoinization on nation level).
“Idiotic letter that #Faketoshi’s lawyers are sending around.” — Samson Mow
June 12, 2020 is when we learned that Craig Wright was hacked again. That is what he claimed, at least, in a letter send by his counsel ONTIER to Blockstream.
“On or around 5 February 2020, access to and control over those Addresses was stolen during a hack on Dr Wright’s computer network. The private keys to those Addresses were stored in an encrypted file on that network, as was part of the information required to open that file. Both the encrypted file and related information were stolen during the hack and deleted from the network.”
Let’s not even get into the false claims of Craig Wright being the inventor of Bitcoin, and Tulip Trading Ltd (one of the entities within Craig’s imaginary Tulip Trust) owning the rights to the Bitcoin brand name, and owning the Bitcoin database.
What is of interest here is that Craig claims ownership of the 1Feex public Bitcoin address. However, every OG Bitcoiner knows that the 1Feex address is indeed linked to a hack, only it’s not a hack related to Craig Wright, as Craig Wright didn’t even know about Bitcoin when the real hack happened on Mt Gox, March 1, 2011, as this must-read Wizsec Security article explains in detail!
Craig is not an OG Bitcoiner. He randomly picked the 1Feex address from the Bitcoin rich list late 2013 as you might have read in “The Faketoshi Tale of 1Feex”, and against all odds, and despite lots of evidence to the contrary, Craig still continues with this 1Feex deceit to the current day.
Samson Mow’s tweet with the ONTIER letter made it to a few articles, for example on Coinfomania. A few quotes:
“The “1Feex” address which Craig Wright claimed to have had access until now was involved in the infamous hack of what was once the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, Mt Gox in 2011.
On March 1, 2011, the address received 79,956 BTC in a single transaction and this sum according to Mt Gox CEO Mark Karpeles was part of what hackers made away with. Interestingly too, the funds have remained unmoved to date.
With Craig Wright now claiming to have held ownership of the address until February this year, a big question arises regarding whether the self-named Bitcoin creator is also associated with the Mt Gox hack in 2011, and if not, how he gained access to the private keys for the wallet.
Mark Karpeles alluded to the possibility of such in a tweet following the latest round of letters that mention the address:
Clearly Craig Wright now has more questions to answer regarding his Satoshi claims, adding the recent unravellings last month.”
So far for Coinfomania. We now have to make a jump to February 24, 2021 before Craig’s followers in his private Slack room learn more about this hack. And boy, oh boy, are they treated with some fine details!
“<<snip>>
Correct, we have evidence of the theft and the break-in. We have the Wi-Fi pineapple that was planted on my property, evidence of other aspects, if those persons who broke into my house to plant equipment and gain access to the network behind the firewall wish to come to court and dispute that it was a hack and that I really gave them the keys, I would welcome it.
They can make the claim that possession of keys proves identity and ownership, they can do this before an English judge.
Ethernet — it was wired behind a TV
I have surveillance cameras with three different companies
on the time that the break-in occurred and someone installed the pineapple in my house while we won’t here — ADT the security firm had a datacentre failure and lost all the records
the police checked into that and it just happens that simultaneously several outages across multiple companies occurred right at the same time
<<snip>>
CSW
Feb 24, 2021”
This Slack message was posted in the public Telegram group ‘CSW_Slack’ on April 18, 2021 and as it happened, the undersigned was the first to report about Craig’s revelations about the February 2020 Pineapple Hack. I might even have coined the hashtag #PineappleGate, I don’t know. But what followed within a week after my tweet is nothing short of hilarious.
Noticed that Craig stated “ADT the security firm had a datacentre failure and lost all the records”?
Yeah.
So ADT was — without my knowledge — multiple times notified of my tweet, then ADT jumped into my Twitter DM to discuss the matter, and five days later, on April 23, 2021 they released the following statement on Twitter.
Oopsie, Craig. Busted. Can things get worse for our cosplayer?
Yes, they can.
Look what happened when Slack user ‘Ronny’ notified Craig of ADT’s statement. And a new Craig Wright meme was born:
Anyway, to cut a long story short, Craig decided to go through with this hack nonsense, and his counsel ONTIER used Craig’s Tulip Trading Ltd vehicle from the Seychelles in April 2021 to sue about a dozen BTC developers, a few BCH and BCH ABC developers, Roger Ver and also the BSV Association to request their help in regaining access to the “hacked” Bitcoin and its forks on the individual networks. Several of these parties joined forces, they hired a lawyer firm who started to question jurisdiction first, and who also requested a substantial security deposit from Craig Wright. Craig was ordered by the Judge to deposit some $450,000, which he did. Then Craig lost the case, not directly on jurisdiction, but on the merits of the claim. Craig is now in the process of appealing. To be continued…
September 2021: The Effort To Exclude Kleiman v Wright Trial Evidence
After several mostly Covid19 related delays, the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit came to conclusion during a Jury trial in November 2021. The $100 million to be paid by Craig Wright to W&K, one of the plaintiffs in the case, as a judgment for illegal Conversion became known early December, 2021.
In the run up to this trial, we can find something very interesting in the public court docket of the Kleiman v Wright case. In September 2021, Craig is trying to have the most damning evidence about his credibility excluded from the trial exhibits. Craig’s counsel Rivero Mestre conveniently lists a summary in their “MOTION TO EXCLUDE IMPROPER CHARACTER EVIDENCE AT TRIAL”.
“Plaintiffs have included documents on their exhibit list that they will likely use to argue, in violation of the Federal Rules of Evidence, that Dr. Wright engaged in prior acts of alleged misconduct. Dr. Wright requests that the Court exclude the following evidence at trial:
- An email sent by Dr. Wright to Ramona Ang while he was still married to his ex-wife Lynn Wright to demonstrate that Dr. Wright “cheated” on his ex-wife. See P679.
- An email from Dr. Wright where he discusses “stealing” some items as a child, teenager, and young adult, including books and a radio. See P770.
- An email quoting news articles asserting that in 2015 Dr. Wright lied about his academic credentials. See P317.
- Documents and testimony that Dr. Wright allegedly forged a contract between an Australian company with which he was affiliated and an organization with which Deborah Kobzah was affiliated in 2014. The contract was later submitted to the ATO in connection with obtaining tax credits on behalf of certain companies that Dr Wright was affiliated with. See P637 at b7576; P638; see also Deborah Kobzah Depo Trans. at 22:11–26–25, December 18, 2019, filed at D.E 590–9.
- A 2015 Australian Search Warrant to search at the offices of Australian companies, with which Dr. Wright was affiliated, in connection with those entities obtaining certain tax credits from the ATO. See P606.
- Documents purportedly showing that in 2014 Dr. Wright allegedly altered email communications between him and the ATO in connection with obtaining certain tax credits on behalf of Australian companies with which he was affiliated. See P063, P238, and P239.
- Documents concerning the resignation of Mr. Andrew Sommer, an Australian attorney, after the ATO denied the contents certain email communications. See P240 and P661.
- Documents and testimony that in 2014 and 2015 Dr. Wright allegedly altered invoices and email communications from High Secured, which were later submitted to the ATO in connection with requesting certain tax credits. See P136, P170, P192 — P197, P199, P204-P206, P613, P616, P617, and P653; see also Edman Second Supplemental Report at 1–6, 40–92, filed at D.E. 500–02.
- Evidence consisting of multiple news articles and a Twitter post stating that Dr. Wright submitted fake documents in this case. See P558, P560, and P562.
Much of the above evidence has little, if any, relevance to the claims in this case.”
Now let’s have a look how Ira Kleiman’s counsel responded to this motion. The whole response is a doozy, but bullet number 2, with the P770 code reference, mostly attracted my interest when it comes to this article about Craig’s hack claims.
Quote (and remember, “Defendant” should be read as “Craig Wright”):
“Second, Defendant seeks to exclude Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 770 because it mentions Defendant “‘stealing’ some items as a child, teenager, and young adult, including books and a radio.” DE [698], at 2 ¶ 2. That is accurate as to some of the contents of the email, but it contains much more than just that. Specifically, in this email, which Defendant sent to his first wife, Defendant admits not just to individual theft, but to being a habitual thief — and not just as a child: “I learned all I could of theft and then put it into practice…. I have actually stolen many times since then, but very few times as a child.”
In the email, Defendant also expressly admits (indeed brags about) being a computer hacker. Again, not discrete acts of hacking but to being a “true hacker” and one of the founding members of “Legion of Doom,” which was once considered to the be most capable hacking groups in the world. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_(hacking).
Recall, Defendant has attempted to use “hacking” as shield against damning documents he has authored, but as this document reveals Defendant himself has used “hacking” as a sword, and would be in a position to “hack himself” for cover. Moreover, Plaintiffs will adduce substantial evidence that Defendant seeks to introduce into evidence documents that he himself has manipulated or forged. By injecting “hacking” as a pillar of his defense to his manipulation and forgery of documents, Defendant cannot in turn ask this Court to exclude his admissions to being a hacker and doing what he now, conveniently, accuses of others of doing.
In short, Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 770 is not merely about Defendant shoplifting as a child or young adult, and Defendant’s attempt to characterize it as such is mere obfuscation. There is no question that Defendant’s admissions relating to stealing and hacking computers are directly relevant to issues at the heart of this case and should not be excluded. It is admissible for the reasons articulated herein.”
Indeed, Craig Wright admits being a more than seasoned computer hacker, and does not ony have the means, motives, opportunity and incentives to create forgeries (which he obfuscates behind “the dog ate my homework” excuses), he certainly also has the skills to create them!
I rest my case here again, ladies and gentlemen.
2021 The COPA v Wright copyright lawsuit
Is there anything to find in the COPA case about Craig Wright’s ‘hack’ claims? Maybe, maybe not, needs to be inquired when we have more material from this case. Placeholder reserved!
Final Rant About Craig Wright’s Hack Nonsense
Two years ago, on May 23, 2020 I unleashed a tweetstorm when I read that Craig Wright’s counsel was defending Craig his false and unsubstantiated hack claims in court the day before. That tweetstorm is still 100% relevant.
Craig Wright — *Hacked*
The most ridiculous part of Craig Wright’s “Opposition To Plaintiffs’ Omnibus Motion In Limine” is where his counsel has the bloody nerve to support the stupid narrative that Craig has been *hacked*. Let’s explore this subject a bit more.
“ample evidence”, and then they link the December 2015 Gizmodo article. Of course they wouldn’t link the Wired article, because in 2019 Wired changed their title to: “Is Bitcoin’s Creator this Unknown Australian Genius? Probably Not (Updated)” And… oops. “fraudulent”
How did these Wired & Gizmodo articles come to life? Let’s go back to 2014. In 2014, Craig desperately tried to get traction as a candidate for the Satoshi role on his blog. With backdated forgeries. And that failed. Nobody paid attention.
So in 2015, still no one noticing his blog posts, Craig Wright got very, very frustrated. Craig showed that frustration on the Amazon website, commenting on Nathaniel Popper’s book “Digital Gold”.
A few weeks later, Craig started to send his *hacked* forgeries around. Newsweek, New York Times (where Nathaniel Popper works): not interested. In November 2015, Wired & Gizmodo were interested. But the *hacker* told 2 different stories…
Splinter News:
“What does seem clear though is that Craig Wright was involved in doxing himself.”
And Gizmodo? A few days later they rectified the article that Craig’s counsel is linking, but of course team Andres Rivero will not tell you that.
Then, Craig Wright’s counsel scribbles down a series of emails & quotes where Craig being hacked is mentioned. On closer inspection, the primary source of all this info is… Craig, who again fails to deliver any evidence of these *hacks*, and that was exactly the point!
“defendant is a high profile figure in the bitcoin community and a prime target for hackers”
LOL! LOL! No.
As another OG in the industry once challenged, “You’re only a public figure because you cosplay as Satoshi.”
Craig Wright, not part of the bitcoin community as he supports an altcoin, is instead the clown of the industry. He pays to be able to speak at conferences, and his patents don’t sell nor get quotes as prior art since 2015. Craig is irrelevant.
Let’s have a look at the pattern of these *hacks*. It doesn’t take much effort to observe: Craig’s forgeries circulate as long as they seem to work within a certain audience, and when they are called out as forgeries: Craig declares *hack*.
To add, Craig Wright has accused numerous people, from “ex-staff” to “Blockstream” to “Ira Kleiman” and whomever else, of these *hacks*. Meanwhile, he never investigated these *hacks* properly, nor put someone in court for these presumed *hacks*. Please explain, Craig?
Let’s have a look at all the *hacks*.
- Contracts and deeds
- Job appointments
- Shareholder minutes
- Numerous emails
- Transcripts
- Online payments
- Invoices, purchase orders and other bookkeeping material
- Official filings
- Signatures
- Mobile phone calls
- Twitter, blog and other online social media posts
All these *hacks* had one purpose: to *prove* that Craig is Satoshi & owns Bitcoin.
Wait, what?
To end, this is how Craig Wright currently describes himself. This “skilled” individual allowed, and still allows, all types of hacking by all kinds of hackers, who were not out to steal money, but only to “edit data”.
How believable is that, team Andres Rivero? Well?
Outtro: The Hackers Shortlist
Now that several of Craig’s hack claims have been mapped out (and have largely been debunked as bogus claims without any evidence), let’s summarize all of the people that Craig has accused of hacking, altering and leaking his documents over the years since he started his Bitcoin scam journey in 2013.
Oh, and Craig… this shortlist might come in handy for you and your counsel ONTIER (are you listening, Simon Cohen?) when you finally decide to investigate your numerous hacker(s), and bring them to justice.
- Hacking group LulzSec
- Hacking collective Anonymous
- Ex-staff from Craig’s companies, among them:
Phillip Montecellio aka Philip Monecillo
Karannan aka Kannan Balakrishnan
Brendan Beverage
Stephen Dekker
Erik eSplanada
Eric O’Donnell
Neil Domseller
Peter Chen
Newton Cheung - Australian Taxation Office personnel, among them:
Des McMaster - Peter Todd
- Gregory ‘Greg’ Maxwell
- Adam Back
- Twitter [or was it Reddit?] handle ‘Contrarian’
- Members of Blockstream
- Members of “Bitcoin Core”
- Mining pools that predominantly mine BTC
- Ira Kleiman
- Jamie Wilson
- Uyen Nguyen
Now that we have learned about all the people that Craig accused of hacking him to alter, forge, backdate, and leak a plethora of his documents since 2011, meanwhile not presenting ANY evidence for these claims…
While at the same time we’ve seen that Craig Wright is actually the only person with means, skills and education, motives, opportunity and incentives, and his digital fingerprints are all over the overwhelming majority of the forgeries…
“Q. For all the forgeries we’re going to examine today and tomorrow morning, have you seen any evidence that any of those forgeries were created by anyone but Craig Wright?”
A. I have not.” — Dr. Edman, forensic expert, November 2021
Now does it really suprise you that the forensic expert Dr. Edman came to the conclusion that I quoted at the start of this article? I mean, REALLY? And would it surprise you if I told you that so far literally ALL of Craig Wright’s Satoshi Nakamoto evidence has been found to be forged, backdated and overall not credible, and fraudulent?
I mean, ALL OF IT?
The end. Thanks for reading, see you next time!
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