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Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news roundup, one day late - my apologies. I’m fraud investigator and technology reporter David Z. Morris.
In this edition: Nuzzi flops, Netflix embezzlement, Bitboy crashes, Eugenic genetics, and why intelligence operations love payments companies.
The holiday season is in full swing here - with family visiting, I actually went to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree for the first time in half a decade. And of course, I have a lot to celebrate - especially, in case you missed it, this spectacular American Prospect review of Stealing the Future, alongside Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage.
Gratitude as well for the reviews that have started rolling in on Amazon and elsewhere!
Grab the book if you haven’t! The momentum is building, get in early.
Subscribe
Incredibly, he was found guilty of *not* churning out low-budget AI-scripted slop. Instead, Carl Rinsch was found guilty of fraud and money laundering for spending about $11 million of Netflix’s money on things other than finishing a movie - things like really expensive mattresses, apparently. Somehow Rinsch faces up to 90 years in prison, but that seems extremely unlikely.
A new video from Atozy traces the continuing descent of Ben Armstrong, a.k.a. Bitboy, a corrupt crypto influencer who peaked in roughly 2022, before the market crash and revelations that Bitboy was selling undisclosed endorsements and dumping tokens on followers, as detailed by Zachxbt. Armstrong haplessly sued Atozy in 2022 for publicizing those very credible allegations.
Bitboy now seems to have had a complete drug-fueled mental breakdown. Whoops!
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That’s how many release-week copies were sold of American Canto, profoundly corrupt former journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s account of her decision to completely compromise obvious, basic ethics and meddle in the 2024 election on behalf of, ultimately, Donald Trump. It is being described in publishing circles as a “debacle of epic proportions,”
Apparently the book doesn’t include any of the salacious details that are now all anyone really cares to hear from Nuzzi (including Vanity Fair). It seems very badly written, too, dripping with the sort of egomaniacal fake Proust that flows through some reporters the second they get to write a whole book (not me, though).
I haven’t written much about Nuzzi here, but I consider her in a class with scumbags like Sam Bankman-Fried and Do Kwon. Her fraud hits a bit closer to home, of course - this is almost certainly the biggest journalistic scandal since I joined the trade.
Alert: Nuzzi appears on The Adam Friedland Show in a likely must-watch episode that drops today.
Quinn Slobodian has a new piece in the FT focused on companies that do gene editing for “boutique” children (paywall). He rightly identifies them as at least in line with the rise of right-wing eugenics, specifically within the technology world.
Subscribe
Speaking of the collapsing news industry.
Yahoo Finance, CNN, and CNBC have all made deals with prediction markets like Kalshi to use their data (and mention their names) on-air, the New Yorker reports. The piece rightly cites the problems: gambling addiction, conflict of interest risks for journalists, and the “ghoulish” nature of betting on event like natural disasters.
It also rightly enough highlights that “the value of [betting] data depends on the liquidity of a particular market” - but the piece doesn’t do the deeper dive to ask whether the bettors on these platforms are actually representative samples and/or should otherwise be taken as a source of truth at any trading volume.
The integration of prediction markets in public life will not stop with the news, and that’s by design. Prediction markets were originally conceived as “Policy Analysis Markets” by current Effective Altruism fellow traveller Robin Hanson, with funding from the U.S. Defense Department (DARPA). The stated goal was to use market dynamics to answer questions including “Will raising the minimum wage lower employment?” and “Will allowing capital punishment lower the murder rate?”
·
November 5, 2024
You’ll notice these are questions hotly debated by experts - but the political tendencies increasingly aligned with Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley authoritarians doesn’t want to have to wade through discussions or evidence. Rather, they want to operationalize their total faith in the Invisible Hand of the Market to eliminate the need for anyone to read or think or learn at all.
Instead, you can just place your bets.
The Financial Times has a big, beautiful update on their work unraveling the story of Jan Marselek, the once high-flying Wirecard executive who was revealed as some type of Russian intelligence affiliate after Wirecard was revealed as a massive fraud.
It was the FT who originally broke the Wirecard Scandal, eventually leading to the revelation that about $2.1 billion in assets claimed by the firm were missing, and in fact had never existed. The broader fraud involved Asian affiliates claiming to generate what turned out to be fake profits.
But beneath this top-level fraud, a lot of other things were going on. We also learned recently of the involvement of Calvin Ayre, known in crypto circles as the sponsor of Satoshi fabulist Craig Wright. Ayre used Wirecard services to move money from his gambling empire, while helping Wirecard juice its numbers by pretending to be several different companies.
·
March 20, 2024
Marselek’s broader agenda, to whatever degree it was driven by his own enthusiasms or GRU priorities, was to create a private army that would control immigration through Libya. It’s not clear to me how this might have served Russian interests (perhaps to give Putin more leverage against EU leaders), but it was undertaken using Russian assets and players.
·
Dec 4
Specifially, Marselek previously used cement factories in Libya as a staging ground for private military contractors. Nominally hired to remove mines from the facilities, the forces Marselek aimed to mobilize were in reality part of a broader Russian approach of putting boots on the ground in East Africa through plausibly deniable commercial cutouts. After Marselek’s defenestration, three of these factories “passed into the hands of a businessman with connections to General Khalifa Haftar, the Russian-backed warlord who rules the east of the north African country.”
Subscribe
This is crucially similar to the operations of intelligence agencies throughout history, and their reliance on the control of banking and payment systems. Most notoriously, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was the CIA’s chosen pathway for funding the Contras in Nicaragua, and other imperialist anti-communist agitation. I have speculated that, especially based on the involvement of CIA-linked law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX may have been an attempt to build a similar illicit payments cutout under U.S. intelligence control.
The story also has a modest crypto connection, through Marselek’s plan to facilitate investors into the initial offering of TON, a planned cryptocurrency token for the Telegram network, circa 2018.
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news roundup, one day late - my apologies. I’m fraud investigator and technology reporter David Z. Morris.
In this edition: Nuzzi flops, Netflix embezzlement, Bitboy crashes, Eugenic genetics, and why intelligence operations love payments companies.
The holiday season is in full swing here - with family visiting, I actually went to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree for the first time in half a decade. And of course, I have a lot to celebrate - especially, in case you missed it, this spectacular American Prospect review of Stealing the Future, alongside Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage.
Gratitude as well for the reviews that have started rolling in on Amazon and elsewhere!
Grab the book if you haven’t! The momentum is building, get in early.
Subscribe
Incredibly, he was found guilty of *not* churning out low-budget AI-scripted slop. Instead, Carl Rinsch was found guilty of fraud and money laundering for spending about $11 million of Netflix’s money on things other than finishing a movie - things like really expensive mattresses, apparently. Somehow Rinsch faces up to 90 years in prison, but that seems extremely unlikely.
A new video from Atozy traces the continuing descent of Ben Armstrong, a.k.a. Bitboy, a corrupt crypto influencer who peaked in roughly 2022, before the market crash and revelations that Bitboy was selling undisclosed endorsements and dumping tokens on followers, as detailed by Zachxbt. Armstrong haplessly sued Atozy in 2022 for publicizing those very credible allegations.
Bitboy now seems to have had a complete drug-fueled mental breakdown. Whoops!
Subscribe
That’s how many release-week copies were sold of American Canto, profoundly corrupt former journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s account of her decision to completely compromise obvious, basic ethics and meddle in the 2024 election on behalf of, ultimately, Donald Trump. It is being described in publishing circles as a “debacle of epic proportions,”
Apparently the book doesn’t include any of the salacious details that are now all anyone really cares to hear from Nuzzi (including Vanity Fair). It seems very badly written, too, dripping with the sort of egomaniacal fake Proust that flows through some reporters the second they get to write a whole book (not me, though).
I haven’t written much about Nuzzi here, but I consider her in a class with scumbags like Sam Bankman-Fried and Do Kwon. Her fraud hits a bit closer to home, of course - this is almost certainly the biggest journalistic scandal since I joined the trade.
Alert: Nuzzi appears on The Adam Friedland Show in a likely must-watch episode that drops today.
Quinn Slobodian has a new piece in the FT focused on companies that do gene editing for “boutique” children (paywall). He rightly identifies them as at least in line with the rise of right-wing eugenics, specifically within the technology world.
Subscribe
Speaking of the collapsing news industry.
Yahoo Finance, CNN, and CNBC have all made deals with prediction markets like Kalshi to use their data (and mention their names) on-air, the New Yorker reports. The piece rightly cites the problems: gambling addiction, conflict of interest risks for journalists, and the “ghoulish” nature of betting on event like natural disasters.
It also rightly enough highlights that “the value of [betting] data depends on the liquidity of a particular market” - but the piece doesn’t do the deeper dive to ask whether the bettors on these platforms are actually representative samples and/or should otherwise be taken as a source of truth at any trading volume.
The integration of prediction markets in public life will not stop with the news, and that’s by design. Prediction markets were originally conceived as “Policy Analysis Markets” by current Effective Altruism fellow traveller Robin Hanson, with funding from the U.S. Defense Department (DARPA). The stated goal was to use market dynamics to answer questions including “Will raising the minimum wage lower employment?” and “Will allowing capital punishment lower the murder rate?”
·
November 5, 2024
You’ll notice these are questions hotly debated by experts - but the political tendencies increasingly aligned with Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley authoritarians doesn’t want to have to wade through discussions or evidence. Rather, they want to operationalize their total faith in the Invisible Hand of the Market to eliminate the need for anyone to read or think or learn at all.
Instead, you can just place your bets.
The Financial Times has a big, beautiful update on their work unraveling the story of Jan Marselek, the once high-flying Wirecard executive who was revealed as some type of Russian intelligence affiliate after Wirecard was revealed as a massive fraud.
It was the FT who originally broke the Wirecard Scandal, eventually leading to the revelation that about $2.1 billion in assets claimed by the firm were missing, and in fact had never existed. The broader fraud involved Asian affiliates claiming to generate what turned out to be fake profits.
But beneath this top-level fraud, a lot of other things were going on. We also learned recently of the involvement of Calvin Ayre, known in crypto circles as the sponsor of Satoshi fabulist Craig Wright. Ayre used Wirecard services to move money from his gambling empire, while helping Wirecard juice its numbers by pretending to be several different companies.
·
March 20, 2024
Marselek’s broader agenda, to whatever degree it was driven by his own enthusiasms or GRU priorities, was to create a private army that would control immigration through Libya. It’s not clear to me how this might have served Russian interests (perhaps to give Putin more leverage against EU leaders), but it was undertaken using Russian assets and players.
·
Dec 4
Specifially, Marselek previously used cement factories in Libya as a staging ground for private military contractors. Nominally hired to remove mines from the facilities, the forces Marselek aimed to mobilize were in reality part of a broader Russian approach of putting boots on the ground in East Africa through plausibly deniable commercial cutouts. After Marselek’s defenestration, three of these factories “passed into the hands of a businessman with connections to General Khalifa Haftar, the Russian-backed warlord who rules the east of the north African country.”
Subscribe
This is crucially similar to the operations of intelligence agencies throughout history, and their reliance on the control of banking and payment systems. Most notoriously, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was the CIA’s chosen pathway for funding the Contras in Nicaragua, and other imperialist anti-communist agitation. I have speculated that, especially based on the involvement of CIA-linked law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX may have been an attempt to build a similar illicit payments cutout under U.S. intelligence control.
The story also has a modest crypto connection, through Marselek’s plan to facilitate investors into the initial offering of TON, a planned cryptocurrency token for the Telegram network, circa 2018.
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
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