If you’re just tuning in to this series, I was suspicious of the narrative behind the string of bank failures in March and did some internet sleuthing. Then it got weird. Then it got scary. I’ve got links at the bottom, but just jump in here; it’s a rabbit hole, but this post may be all you need. If you only read one of these, this is the one I’d recommend.

A month ago, I thought the villain at the end of this would be Peter Thiel. Then I thought it was Mark Zuckerberg. Then a president I’ll be naming shortly. Then Jeffrey Epstein.

But it revealed itself to be something much more twisted: a global network of criminal enterprise; a dystopian shadow government; a fraudulent cancer harnessing network technology to grow to unimaginable size.

Looking back, I desperately wanted somebody to corroborate a story that should sound so implausible but only looked more like the truth the further I researched.

As it turns out, my corroborating witness was found dead in a hotel bathtub in 1991.

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We start with the Inslaw Affair:

Inslaw was a software company in the early 1980s that allowed for unprecedented new databases of information on individuals, connecting many of the government’s disparate data sources in a searchable interface. It was a quantum leap in surveillance for governments and police departments at the time.

Inslaw received a $10 million dollar contract from the Department of Justice that led to a bitter dispute and a lawsuit against the DOJ. Inslaw made some serious claims, including that the DOJ tried to bankrupt them and stole their software and sold it to an Israeli for-profit company. A D.C. Bankruptcy Court judge sided with Inslaw, noting that the DOJ "took, converted, stole, INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS [software] by trickery, fraud, and deceit."

According to the affidavit of Michael Riconosciuto, an engineer who worked on the software, the government had installed spyware so they could sell it to other countries and see all of their activity. Riconosciuto also alleged a secret agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Iran where Iran kept their American hostages intentionally until the election to boost Reagan’s odds (the October Surprise), the collapse of a money laundering bank in Luxembourg, and a host of other wild geopolitical claims. 

Danny Casolaro was a journalist who took the affidavit seriously, getting sucked into a maddening investigation of an international criminal shadow network that he called “the Octopus,” with deep ties to the C.I.A. and the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations.

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I became convinced that my own theories in this series are true because the more evidence I gathered, the more it explained everything I found, despite how outlandish it sounded.

We don’t know if the U.S. government stole Inslaw in order to hide their scheme to spy on other countries, or if any of Riconosciuto’s claims are true. But would it help explain things?   

The judge who sided with Inslaw was denied their reappointment months later. The judge sued the D.C. Court of Appeals, alleging that this was politically motivated.

The new judge reversed the decision against the DOJ.

Riconosciuto was charged with cooking meth eight days after his affidavit, and ultimately convicted.

Danny Casolaro went to West Virginia to meet a source who said they could provide important information on the case. He was found dead in his hotel bathtub, his wrists slit a dozen times.

Although the Inslaw Affair is known in some conspiracy circles, I was unfamiliar until last week. In a showing of the outsize power that’s possible when one person tells another about something important, /u/brother_beer pointed me to the podcast Ghost Stories for the End of the World, which covers Inslaw and the broader conspiracy of the Octopus in immense, incredibly researched detail in their 13-part-series.

After hearing about complex technological theft involving several people and organizations I’ve found in my own research, I realized my story was a sequel, and the Inslaw Affair is likely true near its most conspiracy-minded. Casolaro started with software theft and espionage in 1986, I started with a bank run and Ponzi schemes in 2023, but we both found the Octopus: a vile global network of theft, blackmail, drug smuggling, sex trafficking and Ponzi schemes entrenched in some of the world’s most powerful institutions, with some of the same players at the heart of it.

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I’ve wanted to spill out the scheme I’ve uncovered since part one, but I recognized that it was far too wild and broad to sound reasonable and would be too easily written off as nonsense. If you’ve been following along, I hope I’ve established enough trust and credibility in my research to do so now.

I’ve provided a great deal of evidence for some of these claims and will provide a great deal more for the rest as the series continues. To be clear, this didn’t come from tea leaves or dreams, but from SEC filings, court cases, industry interviews, stock prices, press releases, and so on.

Let me say up front that these are all just allegations. Not because I fear a libel case (these are not things any of these people want to discuss in court) but because I don’t want to give websites any extra ammunition to take this down.

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We are awash in Ponzi schemes. These actors take many forms, but a common public facing one is the wealthy titan of industry, which is used to deflect from inquiries into their fraudulent investments and lure in victims. Household names who have built their careers expressly, intentionally, and criminally engaging in these schemes include Ross Perot, Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, and Carl Icahn (who’s had a rough week).

In the 1980s, some of these players (Perot, Cuban) invested in network technology to replicate and grow Ponzi schemes, and digital currency to allow for more controllable, stealable and launderable assets. PayPal was founded with the express criminal intent to create a digital currency Ponzi scheme but turned into a massive conduit for cash into, out of, and through a global web of criminal networks instead. This includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and some or most (or all) of the PayPal Mafia.

The digital currency Ponzi scheme became cryptocurrency, which was created for this purpose: Stanford University Professors Bob Joss and Joseph Bankman helped design a complex network of offshore exchanges that used a tax loophole to keep cryptocurrency unregulated and move it around the world. Venture capital firms such as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Marc Andreessen’s a16z invested in and helped develop technology expressly and criminally so they could hide and steal crypto assets and launder them around the globe, allowing what became a global decentralized Ponzi scheme, with help from Goldman Sachs’ high frequency trading architect Greg Tusar. This was expressly, intentionally, and criminally participated in by all major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase, FTX, Chanpeng Zhao’s Binance, and the Winklevoss Twins’ Gemini.

Stanford University supported multiple start-ups as fronts for their wealthy and powerful associates to embezzle money into this and related global criminal enterprise. One example was Clinkle, which had express, intentional, criminal investments from Richard Branson, Peter Thiel, Bob Joss, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Intuit, Intel Capital, and Stanford itself (to name a few).

Another example was Theranos, which was created with the express purpose of embezzling funds into international criminal schemes. This includes knowing criminal investments from Henry Kissinger, the Walton Family, Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos.

A later avenue for embezzling funds into this criminal network is Max Levchin’s Affirm Holdings, which they’ve been moving into the scheme the last year. Knowing criminal investors include Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman, Senator Bill Bradley, oil heiress Stacy H. Schusterman, and George Soros’ fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller.

To get a sense of just how massive this enterprise has grown, you can find many of the knowing criminal investors in the tech world in Israel’s Starkware Industries, which includes the fullest list of tech VCs in this scheme, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (Das Kapital Capital, LLC) and Mark Cuban (Radical Israel, LLC).

Multinational institutions were established specifically to move money into these schemes around the world. This includes the NYU President’s Global Council, conceived for this criminal purpose by board chair and Grammy nominee Chandrika Tandon. The song’s quality suggests the nomination was political. Knowing criminal investors include hedge fund billionaire John Paulson (a donation NYU kept secret for ten years), Chandrika and her Ponzi scheme financier husband Ranjan Tandon, and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Another criminal organization operating in a similar manner; accepting massive donations and funneling money into the same criminal networks in the same places; hiding behind non-profit status and goodwill, was the Clinton Global Initiative, intentionally, criminally conceived for this purpose by Bill Clinton, Doug Band, and Jeffrey Epstein. Major co-conspirators include John Podesta, and later Chelsea and Hillary Clinton.

Pizzagate was either created or massively promoted in social and traditional media (often just by covering it) to make sure search results and social media get clogged up with a whole bunch of disinformation when people go looking for (yes, this means that Pizzagate was actually a Clinton op all along). My best guess would be that they leaked Podesta’s emails themselves for this purpose via a bogus “phishing attack.”

Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton’s repeated travel around the world makes much more sense in this context: they weren’t (just?) pedophile chums, they were architects of the same international criminal operation. Although Epstein is typically first thought of as a pedophile, he was running an international blackmail ring involving some of the most powerful people on the planet (which should have been a deeply obvious fact were it not for a media apparatus that didn’t believe this was an angle worth exploring).

Less well recognized was Epstein’s role as criminal financier at Bear Stearns, which collapsed intentionally after they funneled all of the money out of it (this is precisely what happened to First Republic Bank this week, among others). Epstein’s close ties to professors at Ivy League universities wasn’t because he was an eccentric science nerd, but because many of these universities and many of their professors were co-conspirators in the same international criminal enterprise.

Let’s balance the political scales in our curiously partisan times, lest this sound like a right-wing attack on the Clintons. As mentioned above, one of the investors in this scheme is Trump’s nephew-in-law Josh Kushner. He ran a little social media Ponzi scheme while he was a student at Harvard and hasn’t stopped following his father’s criminal footsteps since. His budget health insurance start-up Oscar Health is largely a Ponzi scheme, promoting networks of doctors that they are not actually establishing and never had any intention of establishing. Victims struggle to get in-person appointments and chalk it up to the poor state of health insurance generally, not realizing this was Kushner’s plan all along.

Josh and his brother Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law) then founded Cadre, an app where you can loan them money at a crappy return, which was yet another conduit for funneling liquidity into these criminal networks in secret. 

All of this year’s bank failures were a direct result of this scheme. Silvergate and Signature were criminal banks that knowingly offered services for hundreds of fraudulent cryptocurrency companies to embezzle cash out of the banks and replace it with entirely worthless cryptocurrency.

The run on Silicon Valley Bank was intentional and planned years in advance, carried out by the venture capital firms named above (among others). The trigger for the bank run was the inevitable insolvency of Silvergate (since they were taking all the money out of it); at this point, Silicon Valley Bank expressly, intentionally and criminally released bad financial data in order to justify the planned bank run, kicked off when Founders Fund and others told their customers to pull out of the bank.

This provided multiple benefits: The cryptocurrency industry had spent years positioning itself as a good, safe alternative to traditional banking in poor economic conditions (likely expressly because they knew their massive theft was causing poor economic conditions). This kept victims from withdrawing money from the scheme and brought new money in, with the price of Bitcoin going up over 40% in the ten days following the SVB failure. Founders Fund’s Napoleon Ta got a seat on the Rippling board for this purpose: When the payment processor’s customers were at risk of missing payroll, $2 billion in liquidity flowed right into Brex and back into the Ponzi scheme, which was established and invested in for this purpose (and may have been dumped into Oscar Health on March 28^th).

Nicola Sturgeon was an express, knowing, criminal participant in this part of the scheme, suddenly resigning as Scotland’s Prime Minister in service of it.  

Forbes, which is now 95% owned by cryptocurrency exchange Binance, operates in full support of this vast criminal scheme. Though I can’t state that every person on the Forbes Midas List is a criminal co-conspirator, I can state that it includes dozens of criminals.

Growing in tandem with these Ponzi schemes was the evolution of surveillance software like that in the Inslaw affair. Facebook was either established expressly to become a controlled virtual space and a data  mining surveillance tool, or did so by the time several of the named co-conspirators invested in this scheme (Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, former Walmart board member Jim Breyer). Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel expressly, knowingly, and criminally worked with Cambridge Analytica for this purpose. Facebook also intentionally allowed and supported political disinformation not because they wanted a particular candidate to win, but because they wanted to pollute our social media so thoroughly with bullshit that their criminal scheme would not be exposed.

Several at Facebook have further aimed to bury the truth by gutting journalistic outlets. It is well known that Facebook investor Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker after Gawker outed Thiel. While this is all true, it obscures the fact that Gawker was investigating Thiel’s criminal business interests as well, which likely had much more to do with his decision to support the hulkster.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought progressive magazine The New Republic in 2012, attempting to kill the progressive angle before the staff ran him off. It’s no coincidence that the magazine provides some of the only critical investigative research into cryptocurrency that I can find.

Just this week, Andreessen Horowitz cashed in on their $50 million investment in Buzzfeed, shuttering Buzzfeed News, which wrote about how Peter Thiel secretly bankrolled an “anti-woke” film festival last year.

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Adam D’Angelo founded Quora to further control online narratives, providing answers that protect the co-conspirators under the guise of organic, crowdsourced information.

These criminals deploy a vast network of trolls to monitor social media and promote narratives in service of the scheme. While certain accounts can be confirmed upon close examination, the power of this strategy is that it ultimately does not matter; when enough bad-faith actors promote a narrative -  consistently and repeatedly through all avenues of communication - good-faith actors promote it as well.

When Meta (Facebook) established their cryptocurrency and The Libra Association (since rebranded as Diem and sold to Silvergate Bank last year), it was for the express criminal purpose of funding this criminal network via the last of March’s bank collapses, Credit Suisse.

Libra was established in Geneva, Switzerland, bringing on multiple executives from Credit Suisse.  They raised investments from several high-profile companies, Libra announced they couldn’t get the banking regulations they needed, and the companies pulled out. All of the investors in the Libra Association did so with knowing criminal intent to secretly invest in criminal enterprise (like Clinkle and Theranos), including Uber, Lyft, Stripe, eBay, Kiva and Heifer International (the last of which owned the ranch where Clinton and Epstein associate Mark Middleton was found shot and hanged last year, incidentally).  

When Josh Kushner met with Saudi Arabian leaders in 2017, it could have been about any number of criminal concerns. But given that Thrive Capital was embezzling money into Credit Suisse via the Libra Association, and Saudi Arabia was embezzling money through Credit Suisse via their sovereign wealth fund, it stands to reason that Credit Suisse may have been on the docket.

I’m sure I’m missing a billionaire or two from my notes, but you get the idea. Oh, Shark Tank is fake. They already own that cheap garbage, they just want you watching their infomercials.

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You may think this all sounds farfetched, and I certainly wouldn’t blame you. But let’s pretend for a minute that it’s all true; that there is a vast criminal enterprise. What would that world look like?

Well, we’d probably see economic circumstances continually get worse as civic and economic institutions grow more parasitic.

We’d see governments wholly incapable of improving the circumstances of the people despite having immense power and resources to do so, or prosecuting the criminal networks that have grown within them.

We’d see an erosion of trust as the co-conspirators leverage their positions of power in the government, business, and media to create and circulate misinformation and sow division.

We’d see schools and universities go from institutes of knowledge to propaganda mills that shackle students with years of debt, funnel their time and energy directly into building and improving upon this massive theft.

And we’d see a world where each new advance in technology would be co-opted to best surveil or extract value from the populace, countless empty promises of improving material conditions never coming to fruition.

And we’d see a rise in deaths of despair: more suicides as the criminal networks dismantle safety nets and social cohesion; more drug overdoses pushed on the people by a predatory pharmaceutical industry; more binge drinking and substance abuse as people try to escape a society that has become fully extractive.

And we’d see a world where violence becomes accepted as inevitable, from the random acts of violence of a population growing desperate to the militarization of policing against the populace it ostensibly serves to ongoing wars for ravenous profit that the system becomes incapable of stopping.

We would see a violent suppression of any movements that act in service of the public over the criminal enterprise, with an increasing global movement toward fascism.

Hell, we might see the blatant murder of an international pedophile blackmail artist billionaire criminal financier with suspiciously close ties to presidents and espionage agencies and then a government that refuses to provide any information at all, gaslighting the public into believing that the retched fraud that has overtaken our world is inescapable.

If all that were true, we’d be living in a global kleptocracy.

Impossible, right?

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Part 1: Clinkle and the Snooker document

Part 2: Summer Highlands Ltd. and Stanford

Part 3: The scheme laid out in full. Richard Branson

Part 4: Crypto technical deep dive

Part 5: Go Zuck yourself