👁️ Did London Police Ignore the Murder of a Fake Teen Oligarch?
Plus: TikTok breeds conspiracies; Craig Wright is cooked; Monero is down bad; Adam Neumann wants We back.
Welcome to the weekly Dark Markets news roundup. In case you missed it, check out my conversation with Tiffany Fong, Sam Bankman-Fried’s most determined interrogator.
This week in fraud, grift, and corruption:
The strange life and tragic death of aspiring grifter Zac Brettler.
Binance delists Monero, a cryptocurrency reputedly rooted in Russian organized crime.
TikTok is unleashing a wave of AI-generated conspiracy theories.
Craig Wright’s megafraud nears its end.
Adam Neuman might buy WeWork back.
A Fake Oligarch, a Terrible Fall, and a Buried Investigation.
The New Yorker has delivered the definitive account of the 2019 death of Zac Brettler.
Brettler’s story is a tragic elaboration of the Ana Delvey case: Like Delvey, Brettler was a gifted mimic fascinated by the ultra-wealthy. A middle-class kid with seemingly loving parentz, Brettler was drawn to movies about cons and operators, apparently learning the wrong lessons from War Dogs and The Wolf of Wall Street. Brettler mastered the ways of wealth through his mid-tier British boarding school, where the children of Russian and Middle Eastern wealth collected rubber-stamp English educations.
Brettler began impersonating the son of a Russian mogul, and became entangled with the real ultra-rich. But as the New Yorker explores, many such figures in London are not oil tycoons or software billionaires, but international criminals. In 2019, Brettler, still a teenager, threw himself from the balcony of an apartment where he was socializing with two men: Dave Sharma and Akbar Shamji.
Sharma was a known underworld figure, but Shamji is something else entirely: the seemingly ne’er-do-well son of high-profile banking fraudster Abdul Shamji. Abdul, a Ugandan expat and reputed friend of Margaret Thatcher, was accused of an array of bribery and corruption, and was ultimately jailed for perjury.
This is where Zac Brettler’s death becomes about something larger - London’s new role as a haven for the very largest global financial criminals, particularly Russian and Middle Eastern. This is not just a marriage of convenience bringing together rogue capital and London apartments: it seems, as the New Yorker spells out, to have subverted English law enforcement into deferring to the murderous children of those very criminals.
Binance Delists, Monero Crashes
Monero is probably the most interesting “privacy coin” - a blockchain token that obscures addresses and identities. Other contenders obviously include Zcash and my friend Tor Bair’s Secret Network.
But Monero is the only privacy coin whose core mechanics were reputedly created by a genius mathmatician working of the Russian Mafia; was built with a malicious backdoor that the community noticed; then thrived after the creation of a fresh and truly community-driven fork. That story may be one to tell soon: Monero arguably had the only genuinely fair launch of a cryptocurrency since Bitcoin.
Anyway, Monero was delisted from the crypto exchange Binance and lost as much as 40% of its market value in one day. Which could actually have been worse, now that I think about it, and there’s even been a major subsequent rebound - net, XMR is only down about 23.5% since the delisting.
What’s more interesting is speculation around the reason for the delisting. Coindesk reports that Binance simply said XMR no longer “met its standards,” which is obviously vague (bizarrely, I’m getting a login screen in front of Binance’s actual post, to which I say - I rebuke you, DOJ).
Binance is now under a supervision order from the U.S. Department of Justice, following a plea deal and settlement on money laundering charges. That doesn’t give DOJ any operational control, but it’s not hard to imagine the argument that trading XMR inherently makes transparency impossible.
TikTok is incentivizing AI Conspiracy Theories
Media Matters reports on a chilling new wave of social media con-artists, getting paid by Chinese corporation to poison the infosphere. I know that sounds conspiratorial itself, but it’s just a statement of fact.
TikTok’s new Creativity Program pays creators for views of videos longer than 60 seconds, and manufactured conspiracy theory posts have performed spectacularly well.
AI tools like ChatGPT are being used to mass-produce the scripts, voiceovers, and images in this valuable “niche.” They’re accompanied by a thriving cottage industry of posters trying to get maximum spread for entirely manufactured ideas.
“Popular AI content creators [sell] their expertise as coaches, offering weekly calls, instructional videos, and video ideas to those willing to pay for expensive premium memberships.”
Here’s one of many insider chats captured by Media Matters:
In short, TikTok is now the platform for ten thousand little Alex Joneses.
The posts highlighted by Media Matters, it must be said, seem more of the “Ancient Aliens” variety (or even “Werewolves are real”) than the “Joe Biden eats Babies” strain. That is, they seem more like entertainment than politics - but obviously that’s a fine line.
More importantly, this is a clear signal of what generative AI is really good for, in economic terms - churning out barely-comprehensible slop for the consumption of the barely literate. This is the dream Sam Altman is pursuing, even if he can’t admit it to himself.
Craig Wrong
Craig Wright, a.k.a. Lietoshi Fakeamoto, is spinning in the grave he dug himself, and it’s wildly entertaining. The COPA vs. Wright trial, in which Wright must finally prove his longtime claims that he was the creator of Bitcoin. He’s been having an unsurprisingly hard time, since that claim is patently false.
According to Forbes, “In one instance, Wright exclaimed in court, ‘But I AM Satoshi!’”, which actually about sums up the foundations for his claim. That is, there are none.
As predictable as clockwork, seemingly all of the documents Wright produced to support his claim to be Satoshi have been revealed as fake, including by the analysis of Wright’s own expert witnesses.
He responded by calling his own experts idiots, of course, and also by claiming that every instance of revealed forgery was part of an all-encompassing quest to smear him, Craig Wright. Effectively Wright claims that all the documents are real, but were corrupted ahead of each of his trials by a cabal of hackers who made them look fake without his knowledge.
A judge has reprimanded Wright for these convoluted and unsupported defenses, ordering him to stop making “irrelevant allegations”.
Wright has also waffled on the question of whether Calvin Ayre is funding his case. After initially denying it, Wright last week seemed to admit to Ayre’s funding, but only through a “loan.” Ayre is ultimately somewhat more interesting than Wright in all this: he appears to have seen Wright as a potential cash cow who could help him either seize crypto-assets, or build a real business based on Wright’s BSV.
Either goal makes clear that Ayre is exactly the bloated, dull-witted gambling mogul he appears to be. How he responds after it becomes indisputable that Wright conned him will be extremely interesting.
As Protos explores excellently, the goal of the COPA group, supported by Coinbased, Microstrategy, and Jack Dorsey, is to prevent Wright from filing more malicious patent lawsuits against Bitcoin developers in London.
Adam Neumann Might Buy WeWork Back
Matt Levine calls it “the funniest trade in the history of financial markets,” and he’s not wrong.
Remember Adam Neumann? The completely full of shit founder who wanted to turn office subleasing into a tech company that would save the world? That moron? Well, sadly, turns out he’s what qualifies as a genius in 2024.
Neumann talked a string of nonsense to Masayoshi Son and walked away a billionaire. Then the company he got rich building turned out to be worthless, and now he wants to buy it back for less than the chunk of Masayoshi’s money he walked away with when he was kicked out.
The entire thing might also just be a LARP, though - the Journal reports that WeWork’s current execs are stonewalling Neumann. Which, good on them, his return would surely somehow turn into another massive bust-out.
Because that’s what Neumann is, for all his shoeless dipshittery: a gangster by other means.
Have a great week,
David.