👁️ Literacy was Faketoshi's Kryptonite
Craig Wright's fraud was painfully obvious. Plus Boeing's dead whistleblower, tween bank robbers, and other shady news.
A U.K. Judge has ruled that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, which should put an end to the BSV scam and the string of nuisance lawsuits the delusional, unhinged Wright has flung at cryptocurrency developers and public figures over the last eight years. Wright’s fraud should always have been obvious to anyone who read English at an adult level, but now we have a binding judgment on the matter.
Also in today’s roundup: Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower; Tween Bank Robbers; OpenAI’s CTO flops; A Phisher of Men
Reader Poll: Community Forums
First, please take a moment to help me plan the next stage of Dark Markets’ evolution.
Right now, this is largely a broadcast channel - I write, you read. I want to start working on more interactivity and community. The question is how *you* would prefer to hang out and share insights with other fraud-heads online.
I won’t spell these out too in-depth. They aren’t mutually exclusive in practice, but for voting purposes, please pick the one (1) that would be most appealing to you!
Literacy was Faketoshi’s Kryptonite
Craig Wright’s U.K. trial was a genuine embarrassment, probably for everyone involved. Arthur van Pelt and other dedicated Faketoshi watchers gave us a blow-by-blow of Craig’s ceaseless, paper-thin lies and forgeries, including many seemingly cooked up on the fly in the course of the trial. The takeaway is that Craig Wright is either an incredibly stupid man, or very desperate, and I think the answer is both.
It feels good to put another dead opp on my trophy rack: Craig and his pathetic post-billionaire dog Calvin Ayre threatened to sue me for pointing out that “CoinGeek” had the same self-dealing editorial ethos as the Taco Bell Blog.
In retrospect, I feel bad for slandering Taco Bell.
Anyway, a U.K. judge has settled the matter, but that shouldn’t have been necessary. It was always incredibly obvious that Craig’s claims to have created Bitcoin were total bullshit.
As just one random example, look at these screenshots from a BSV Slack channel, collected by @cryptodevil:
For a competent reader of the English language, a few things are obvious here, and should have been obvious long ago:
Craig Wright is barely literate. It’s impossible that he wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper. What the absolute fuck is this, truly?
Craig Wright can’t think in a clear, linear fashion - not even well enough to lie competently. This was equally clear in the COPA trial, where he was repeatedly caught in obvious fabrications.
Craig Wright suffers from delusions of grandeur, in the most literal sense. He’s mentally unwell.
Craig Wright is a reactive, irrational, emotional wreck.
I often think that my main valuable skill is being able to read - to read critically, to read between the lines, to not take things at face value. People reveal themselves more than they intend, consistently (Sam Bankman-Fried being a notable, fascinating exception, his self-delusion making him the Manchurian Candidate of fraud).
If you want to be better at spotting scams, in short, read a book. Charles Dickens’ works are full of operators just as comical as Craig Wright - give David Copperfield a try.
The more you read, the better you’ll get at detecting inverted characters like Faketoshi - merely based on the way they express themselves.
Boeing Whistleblower Found Dead
John Barnett, a quality control manager and 30 year veteran of Boeing, had just finished the second of three planned days of deposition in a lawsuit against the floundering aircraft maker. Then he killed himself.
Barnett had blown the whistle on substandard parts and flawed oxygen systems in Boeing’s South Carolina plant. A friend claimed Barnett told her that “if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”
‘Tween Bank Robbers
The FBI’s Houston office is seeking a trio of youngsters who robbed a bank! “Witnesses describe the trio of bank robbers as being between 14-18 years old. They left the bank on foot.”
The fact that they chose a Wells Fargo at least gives me some hope for the youth.
OpenAI’s CTO Gives the Worst Interview Ever Not Featuring Elon Musk
When asked whether the company’s models were trained on public YouTube data - along with several other important questions that should have been easy - OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Muraty basically just vamped for a few minutes on questions core to her technology. But she also seems to think that “publicly available” means “we can do what we want with it,” strongly implying that there are no controls in place for copyrighted material.
Which … seems bad? As in “this could end up in evidence in a civil trial” bad?
A $2.6 Million Crypto Impersonation
An account or accounts impersonating crypto trader/influencer Ansem stole $2.6 million by impersonating Ansem in his own Twitter replies, according to crypto sleuth ZachXBT.
One victim lost $1.2 million - not because he actively sent more than a million dollars to a fake token presale, but because the link actually went to a wallet drainer. You do have to actually approve a transcation for a drainer to take your money, and you should absolutely not have $1.2 million in hot (online-connected) wallet, so hopefully some hard lessons were learned here.
Pick o’ the Tweets
Austin Campbell unleashed a real banger of a rant about the ineptitude of Gary Gensler’s SEC. It’s a very, very long tweet (more of an essay, really), but here’s a major highlight, showing that the SEC consistently went after crypto-related entities who had made *administrative errors* - but almost never pursued projects that had committed actual criminal fraud.
