Welcome to Dark Markets, a weekly roundup of technology fraud. I’m longtime tech and finance reporter David Z. Morris.
Some quick housekeeping as we get closer to the release date for my new book Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia (Please consider pre-ordering if you haven’t).
On November 11th, as I’ve mentioned several times here, I’ll be at Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn. There I’ll be in conversation with Ben Schiller, the former CoinDesk Opinion editor who sheperded my work on SBF. This is a ticketed event, and though I don’t expect a sellout, you never know.
On November 15th, I’ll be speaking in Buenos Aires (yes, Argentina) at Sub(zero), the Polkadot-sponsored side event right before Devconnect.
On November 20th, I’ll be at Codex Books in midtown Manhattan, where I’ll be interviewed by
Share Dialog
Yes, I’m having something like an actual book tour! If you’d like me to come to your town, please reach out. And yes, I’m taking a very short trip to Argentina, which is going to be interesting. Wish me luck.
It’s a fitting wet-fart end for the dying movement: having one of its emblematic “profitable world-changing” projects turned into a plaything for their fellow degenerate gamblers. BYND 0.00%↑ was a project driven by the EA-friendly idea of “doing good by doing better,” and explicitly EA projects like Lever VC boosted it. But the company is now dying, so meme manipulators sent it on one last run, up 1300% last Wednesday, before the inevitable ongoing crash-out. Cue the Sad Trombone.
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July 14, 2024
We start things today with an absolute jaw-dropper. Remember the $Libra scam, when a memecoiner got the President of Argentina to endorse a memecoin, then stole about $100 million?
Well, it turns out this wasn’t just some random memecoiner: perpetrator Hayden Davis’ great-grandfather was Evril LeBaron, a psychopathic Mormon polygamist cult leader who manipulated his many wives and others to assassinate his rivals and other targets. LeBaron is often referred to as “The Mormon Manson,” and is linked to dozens of murders.
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Feb 17
This was reported back in February by Bloomberg (and in the Buenos Aires Times), but it entirely slipped past me - and seemingly many others.
Evril LeBaron reputedly oversaw nearly fifty (50) murders committed by his brainwashed child brides - apparently including ordering the killing of Davis’ own grandfather. The murders came after the clan originally relocated to Mexico’s “Colonia LeBaron,” a desperate scrap of land without running water where the family were at least free to practice polygamy (a.k.a. institutionalized child rape). The truly harrowing details are laid out in a recent documentary, Daughters of the Cult.
Amazingly, though, Davis’ criminal lineage comes at least as much from his father Tom Davis as from the LeBaron blood passed to him by his mother, Emily Chynoweth. This very solid overview by an independent investigator details the insane fact that Davis’ father, in addition to being a career counterfeiter, apparently engaged in espionage in Russia.
Davis’ descent from LeBaron is significant for two reasons. First, because it adds to my growing sense that we need to acknowledge a genetic component of narcissism and sociopathy, which we see here being passed down from one bad seed to the next. Second and more important, it invites even closer scrutiny of the big question - How did Kelsier Ventures get close to Trump? Colonia LeBaron and its many operatives have been speculated by some to have acted as convenient U.S. intelligence cutouts, which would align with other speculation of Melania Trump’s origins in the Epstein network.
Believe it or not, there’s also a TV movie, with Brian Dennehy playing Evril LeBaron, if you’re willing to shell out $40 for a DVD.
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Razzlekhan, a.k.a. Heather Morgan, has been released from prison, apparently with help from Donald Trump. Morgan was convicted, alongside seemingly still-imprisoned husband Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, of (happlessly) laundering a small portion of a Bitcoin hoard originally hacked from Bitfinex in 2016. Lichtenstein and Morgan were not convicted of the hack itself, and there is considerable debate over whether the pair were competent enough hackers to have pulled off the heist - or whether they might have had help.
More to the point, though, there’s no reason to think Morgan is any less guilty now than she was when convicted a year ago. Any more than that would be true of other pardon recipients including Nikola’s Trevor Milton; Reality TV scammers Todd and Julie Chrisley; or Medicare embezzler Philip Esformes.
Why is the Trump administration so devoted to freeing very well-known hustlers and investment fraudsters? There are both material and symbolic elements, but they all stand to benefit Trump. I was shocked, for instance, to learn that Milton’s pardon wipes out more than $600 million in restitution owed to his victims. It seems he instead gets to keep that money - and likely send some of it back to the admin or the Trump campaign.
More symbolically, of course, Trump is pardoning people who do what he does - that is, lie and steal. It’s a clear signal of the “crime is legal” era, the permissiveness and defiance that may be the real appeal of Trump’s brand with his base. This is why I’m focusing on this commutation of Razzlekhan’s sentence rather than the also recent pardoning of Changpeng Zhao of Binance - Zhao actually gave Trump something in return for the pardon, but Trump let Razzlekhan out strictly because he loves crime and criminals.
But the final motive I’d posit is that pardons of a way of creating very personal loyalty to Trump. It was utterly unsurprising to see that Razzlekhan thanked “Daddy Trump” for her early release. It’s just one tiny index of the eagerness with which the worst people on the planet embrace fascism when it benefits them personally, because they know fair competition is beyond their abilities.
I remain fairly confident that Sam Bankman-Fried won’t get a pardon, despite his parents reportedly lobbying Trump hard for one. That’s not because of any difference between him and Razzlekhan (there’s not), it’s because he loudly bragged about all the stolen money he was giving to Democrats.
Because he’s an idiot! So that’s nice, at least.
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Catching up on Bitcoin’s current overriding controversy: “The BIP 44 Proposal is incredibly bad.” According to BitMEX Research, it doesn’t just break Bitcoin’s consensus model (likely destroying about $2.2 trillion in market cap), it actually incentivizes posting child abuse material (CSAM) to Bitcoin. That’s because, apparently, the new system triggers a re-organization of the chain when CSAM is detected, triggering a possible double spend.
So yeah maybe don’t hand the reins (or your support) to a religious nutjob seemingly at the trailing end of a psychotic break mediated through Bitcoin governance.
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