Month: August 2022

ACADEMIC WHO CLAIMS TO HAVE INVENTED BITCOIN AWARDED JUST £1 AFTER ‘DELIBERATELY FALSE’ LIBEL EVIDENCE

On 1 August, the Law Society Gazette reported that, in the High Court in London, an academic who claims to have invented the bitcoin digital currency has won a libel case against a blogger who accused him of fraud – but will receive just £1 in damages after a judge ruled he had made a ‘deliberately false case’ about the harm caused.  While tweets had defamed Dr Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, who claims to be ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, but because Wright ‘advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence’, he ‘should receive only nominal damages’.

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/dr-bitcoin-awarded-1-after-deliberately-false-libel-evidence/5113293.article

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/dr-bitcoin-denies-fabricating-evidence-of-libel-harm/5112586.article

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HOW SMUGGLERS MADE TENS OF MILLIONS MOVING RARE BIRDS AROUND THE WORLD

On 1 August, a report from OCCRP says that, for years, an organised crime group spent years smuggling rare exotic birds from South America and Asia to collectors across Europe, but that now, one of their former couriers is speaking out.  It has been estimated that the smugglers could have made around €30 million a year.  The ex-smuggler told OCCRP that he made an average of €50,000 on each trip to deliver birds, and sometimes as much as €140,000.  The smugglers frequently used fake CITES permits, or reused permits many times over, to move birds into the EU.  Metal rings around birds’ legs are supposed to prove that they were bred in captivity, but the smugglers also found a way to fake those.

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/astronomical-money-how-smugglers-made-tens-of-millions-moving-rare-birds-around-the-world

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