- New evidence suggests that Craig Wright’s claim to own the famous 1Feex wallet is almost certainly false
- Images of the paper wallet Wright claimed were his show key inconsistencies will the real thing
- Wright has been funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars based on his supposed ownership of wallets such as this
Craig Wright’s claim that he owns the famous Bitcoin address beginning 1Feex took another knock over the weekend when it was revealed that the paper wallet he used to secure millions of dollars of funding in 2015 was a forgery. Wright has long claimed that the address, which contains almost ₿79,957 ($3.75 billion), has belonged to him since he bought it from a Russian exchange in 2011 and was part of the haul stolen from him in February 2020. However, new evidence has shown that these claims, which were always spurious, are almost certainly a fabrication designed to net him tens of millions of dollars in funding.
Wright Says Coins Were Stolen in Pineapple Hack
Wright claims that he bought the bitcoin in the 1Feex wallet from Russian exchange WMIRK in 2011, despite there being strong evidence that the address was instead used to receive stolen coins from Mt. Gox. Indeed, the only evidence supporting this supposed purchase is an invoice that even Coingeek admits “contains some inaccuracies.”
The coins have never left the wallet, and Wright claims they were stolen from him in the infamous ‘pineapple’ hack of February 2020, which at today’s price makes it the biggest ever heist in history. Wright has never appealed for help in tracking down the thieves, and only used the supposed theft to further his attempts to force developers to ‘break’ the Bitcoin blockchain and hand them back to him.
WizSec Exposes Ownership Claims
Over the weekend, WizSec Bitcoin Research posted a tweet thread which highlighted the extraordinary way in which Calvin Ayre and others were duped into thinking Wright had access to the ₿79,957 and handed him over millions of dollars in funding to prove his case to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and then launch legal proceedings against a number of people in the Bitcoin space:
A brief history of Craig Wright’s false claims to own the @1FeexV6 Bitcoin address containing 80k BTC (one of many addresses he’s claimed to own even though they belong to other people), over which he’s launched a spurious lawsuit to harass Bitcoin developers:
— WizSec Bitcoin Research (@wizsecurity) December 18, 2021
WizSec says that Wright couldn’t have bought the bitcoin from WMIRK in 2011 because it only started dealing in Bitcoin in 2013, and further shows how the paper wallet Wright used was a sloppy forgery that bore crucial differences from the real paper wallets at the time:
Following up on this claim, Wright was showing around the following printed paper wallet circa mid-2015, seemingly in order to convince potential bailout investor Calvin Ayre that Wright’s claimed Bitcoin holdings were real. pic.twitter.com/hEnedozAFp
— WizSec Bitcoin Research (@wizsecurity) December 18, 2021
The debunking of these documents piles further proof onto Wright, especially regarding his ability to pay the $100 million from the Kleiman vs Wright lawsuit, and raises fresh questions as to the diligence done by Calvin Ayre, Stefan Matthews, and Robert MacGregor in funding Wright for the past six years.
