Karma Strikes Martin Shkreli As He Loses $15 mln To a Fraud

Martin Shkreli says he has lost 37000 Bitcoins to a fraud. Is there any truth in his claims or just another publicity stunt?
Neer Varshney
Posted by Neer Varshney February 17, 2016 2 Mins Read
Martin Shkreli says he has lost 37000 Bitcoins to a fraud. Is there any truth in his claims or just another publicity stunt?

Martin Shkreli, dubbed by media as the “most hated man in the United States”, claims he lost $15 mln, set aside to buy Kanye West’s latest album, in a Bitcoin transaction.

An American entrepreneur and former CEO of Retrophin, Skreli first rose to fame when he raised the price of a life-saving drug by more than 5000%. Living up to his reputation as the villain, he recently announced that he wanted to “buy” Kanye West’s latest album so that it doesn’t get released publicly.

But two days later, this happened:

Oops!

Getting ripped off - or else

Was Martin Shkreli actually ripped off by “Daquan” or was it just one more of Martin Shkreli’s publicity stunts?

Tone Vays, head of research at BraveNewCoin says “Securing and properly sending your Bitcoins is a real challenge. But never believe anything a person says about their Bitcoins because it is almost always unprovable. You know, like Mike Hearn saying he sold all of his Bitcoins!”

Cointelegraph tried to verify the claim made by Martin Shkreli independently, but was unable to find any Bitcoin transaction or multiple transactions that took place in this time period that could amount to $15 million!

So let alone getting ripped off, there’s a possibility that no transaction took place at all.

Can Satoshi help?

A little while later, Martin claimed that he had gotten in touch with the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, a person whose identity is not even certain, and that Satoshi had agreed to help:  

But can even the creator of Bitcoin help Martin get his money back? Our experts certainly don’t think so.

Bas Wisselink of Nxt Foundation says:

"Unlike the corporate system that spawns people like Martin Shkreli, a well deployed cryptocurrency cannot be controlled by the creator. There is no Big Banker in the system. There is no single entity exercising control. The fact that people like Shkreli cannot grasp this shift in paradigm to a system where you don't need to have such an entity is reassuring.”

As per Tone Vays, the fact that Martin even thinks Satoshi can do something to help him or even acknowledge the request means he does not understand how Bitcoin works, and that it also makes him question whether he made any transaction in the first place at all.

Anyway, Martin Shkreli has already seemed to have moved on, after all, it was only $15 million! Now he wants someone to set him up with Lindsay Lohan.

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