Hello and welcome to your weekly Dark Markets tech-fraud news roundup. I’m David Z. Morris, a longtime technology and finance reporter for Fortune and the late, lamented CoinDesk.
We are inching ever closer to the November 11 release of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia. If you’re planning on buying the book, please consider pre-ordering now - it will be a huge boost to our efforts to hit best-seller lists.
And on that note …
I am emotionally overwhelmed to announce (in an exclusive first to you lovely subscribers!) that the release event for “Stealing the Future” will be on November 11 at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn (Specifically, the Arena location). More details to come.
I’ll have so much more to say about how significant this is for me. Honestly it’s a bit hard to get my head around but in short: I moved to New York ten years ago in pursuit of a dream, and, I’ll be god damned - I did it.
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This is truly an incredible post by Sean Kernan at Thrive, pointing out specific tells that you won’t be able to unsee. For example, ChatGPT “stays in the same [perspective] voice from start to finish. From top to bottom, it will all be in 2nd [person], or all 3rd, but not both.” There’s also the constant use of parallelism, or “It’s not about X, it’s about Y,” whose recurrence “highlights how low IQ these language models can really be. They are just blindly repeating these structures over and over again.”
In a fatal 2019 crash. Here’s how a hacker found it, leading to a $243 million verdict this month.
The infamous hacker conference’s reputation has been eroding for some time now. The recent forceful ejection of Jeremy Hammond, who served prison time for hacking a private security contractor and leaking emails to Wikileaks, seems a further relevant data point.
Sometimes, God truly is great.
On Friday, Just Sun’s wallet addresses were blacklisted on the World Liberty Financial platform founded by Donald Trump and family. That means he can’t sell any of the gargantuan pile of assets he bought there as a back-door bribe to Trump.
WLFI has been very successful over the short term, largely thanks to the successful $Trump memecoin launch. So while Sun initially reportedly bought $75 million worth of WLFI assets, it was worth close to $122 million at the moment they got locked up. Apparently, the lockup was punishment for signs that Sun was trying to sell unlocked tokens, but Sun claims these were tests rather than seloffs protests these were
This is particularly humiliating for Sun (and gleefully entertaining for the rest of us) because Sun has been using WLFI to try and curry favor with Trump since the $Trump memecoin launched in February. In addition to “investing” $75 million, Sun fawned at Trump’s feet after attending the $TRUMP presidential access dinner, insisting that “memecoins have merit.” (They almost certainly do not.)
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Sun may or may not have had a specific agenda here, but one can impute that a pardon for his many alleged crimes was somewhere on his mind. Having all of his money stolen instead is delicious schadenfreude simply as a comeuppance for shameless bribery.
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Sep 7
But much more specifically hilarious because it’s yet another instance of Sun being very, very bad at the technical side of crypto. In a truly decentralized system, such as Ethereum, Uniswap or (maybe) Hyperliquid, there is no central controlling entity with the ability to take away anyone else’s money. WLFI could only have the ability to blacklist because it is, essentially, a fake crypto project: its use of a blockchain is merely cosmetic.
The fact that Sun handed over $75 million in liquid assets on the basis of trust in Donald Trump could not be more indicative of his incompetence on every level - and how indistinguishable stupidity and corruption usually are.
Well that’s incredibly fucking convenient. Decrypt reports that according to the Office of the Inspector General, a technical mishap led to the permanent deletion of a full year of former SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s official text message communications.
2023 was the perfect year of comms to lose, too, if you were trying to hide your responses to allegations of extralegal attempts to cut off cryptocurrency firms from the banking system, which Nic Carter dubbed “Chokepoint 2.0” in … February of 2023.
People I respect think the crypto debanking narrative is bunk, and I certainly saw it trotted out as a convenient excuse by losers like David Marcus.
But deleting the evidence in public view? Gary, it’s not just immoral - you’re doing it badly.
Remember this fuckin’ dumbass?
It feels like just yesterday that Hayden Davis was nearly getting Argentinian President Javier Milei impeached by pitching him on promoting a crypto-token, then giving a mind-boggling interview in which he not only confessed to his own crimes, but exposed in detail the insider trading that defines the entire memecoin “economy.”
And now Davis is back! Hallelujah, things were getting boring.
In a new interview with Laura Shin of Unchained, Bubblemaps CEO Nicolas Vaiman walks us through the astonishing revelation that Davis also sniped Kanye West’s recent memecoin launch, again scalping tens of millions of dollars. One of the many pieces of evidence for insider collusion is that the launchers of the “YZY” token deployed 50 copies of their lauch contract, and chose one at random for the actual live launch.
Out of those 50 possibilities, Hayden Davis seems to have guessed right. Incredible.
Even more incredible is that Davis appears to already be under an Interpol Red Notice from Argentina, and also expressed fears earlier this year that his life was in danger. Doing more criminal insider trading, which again presents the risk of stepping on powerful and unaccountable toes, does not fix that situation.
(Note: Memecoin trading is also the focus of my upcoming feature in Use Case Magazine. Sign up here to get updates on the print edition’s timeline.)
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