The Biggest Crypto Heist That Nobody Knows About
Thousands of People, Millions of Dollars Worth of Bitcoin
By Donald Norman
Update: Since writing the article below, I have discovered new evidence. Patrick Strateman it turns out DIDN'T even pay those 12 of out 5,000 people. He just collected around 12 releases. I have discovered at least two cases where people signed releases (in one case in late 2014 and another in late 2017 - both people were owed life-changing sums) but Patrick never paid. He only offered false hope. The correspondence spaning years and is simply cruel. I will be putting some of the public evidence online after redactions.
I have also discovered that Patrick had started denying people funds well before he took down the site in March 2014. In fact, many clients report not being able to access their bitcoin starting right after the incredible (even by bitcoin standards) price spike in December 2013.
I have also discovered that, whereas before I was under the impression that 95%+ maybe even 98%+ of people who were embezzled did not know they were embezzled, after putting out this site and spending countless hours attempting to track down as many as many people as I could to help with legal filings, I found out that most people in fact were very aware they had their money robbed, often knew exactly how much they were owed and many even had evidence to back it up. Now I would guess that as many as 95+% of people knew they were robbed, whereas before, I had taken Patrick at his word and assumed the opposite. Still many people lost evidence of their communications as it was kept on the Intersango support ticketing system which Patrick took down.
Furthermore, I discovered an email from Amir to one of these clients who signed a release. In that email (dated April 2014) Amir expresses that Patrick Strateman may in fact be embezzling customer bitcoin. The following is a direct quote from Amir Taaki's email where he is responding to a question as to whether Patrick Strateman intends to honor his commitment to send people their funds.
“I honestly don't know. I trust Patrick as a person with integrity, but it's been some months with people complaining. I have pressure from Donald to sign some legal thing to put pressure on Patrick, but I'm waiting to try and meet him in person before I do anything drastic.”
Almost a decade later, the person Amir was corresponding with would still not be paid nor would Amir have done anything, let alone something as drastic as signing a piece of paper. Of course now we know Amir had less than a month earlier received a payment valued at 2,500 BTC and that he would later continued to be paid off by Patrick Strateman.
Intersango, a now defunct crypto exchange that I co-founded and which hasn’t operated in almost a decade, owes its users tens of millions of dollars in bitcoin. At the height of bitcoin’s price, this figure may have reached a quarter billion dollars. The kicker… almost none of the clients who are owed have any idea and the one person who had promised to pay these clients back never did. In open court testimony, Patrick Strateman, the only person who had access to the site database and bitcoin, testified that he sold proceeds from user coins (known as forked coins) for millions of dollars and pocketed the money without anyone’s knowledge or consent. He still holds onto over three thousand of user bitcoin currently worth more than 50 million dollars. [Testimony on user bitcoin]
Mr. Strateman, along with ex-partner Amir Taaki and Jamie Strateman (Strateman’s mother), engaged in fraud and a cover up which involved accounting fraud, tax fraud, forging a signature, and much more. Furthermore, evidence shows that the cruel nature in which Mr. Strateman led on one of his victims may have ultimately contributed to that person’s death. To this day, no one has been held accountable and this has only been brought to public attention through the persistence of a wronged business partner, yours truly and the author of this article. This is the story of why it took me so long to expose the fraud perpetrated by the company I co-founded and into which I poured the greater part of my life savings. Perhaps this article will in some way inspire law enforcement to get involved and help those who have been robbed reclaim what is rightfully theirs and allow the crimes of Patrick Strateman to not go unchecked.
As the security specialist of the site, Patrick had exclusive access to user bitcoin, the database (showing client accounts, contact information and their associated balances), the server, the domain and all technical aspects of the company. Patrick used this power to withhold accounting data and control site profits beginning at least as early as April 2012. By the end of 2012, he proceeded to extort me saying that if I continued to meddle in company affairs he would delete the user database. I had no power to stop him. The person I had once seen as a close friend would occasionally repeat this extortion under a euphemism saying he would “walk away” when I expressed concern about how he was handling the site. Without any other recourse, I had no choice but to sit and wait.
Now, throughout the end of 2012 and 2013, Intersango, once the world's second largest cryptocurrency exchange, allowed users to trade and withdraw their balances. Had Patrick started blocking users from their funds or bitcoin, many of the thousands of users would have taken to public forums and messaging boards. The lack of any significant complaints assured me Patrick was not acting in bad faith towards the users during that period. I was even able to look into at least one complaint independently despite Patrick having blocked my access to Intersango records. And even though I was being extorted and other criminal actions had been taken against me such as illegally being taken off as a shareholder [EXHIBIT 1216] or having my signature forged by Patrick’s mother [EXHIBIT 1315] which prevented me from accessing the accounting, I knew that the users weren’t being robbed. At least, that was until April 14th, 2014.
Patrick recently gave sworn testimony saying twice that in 2014, and in response to the freezing of Intersango's bank account (a Polish based business bank account called Zachodni), he took down the website. But this is not true.
CALIFORNIA SUPERIOR COURT, SAN FRANCISCO TESTIMONY OF MR. PATRICK STRATEMAN
3 Q. Intersango was shut down in March 2014,
4 that's what you submitted in a declaration,
5 correct?
6 A. Intersango trading completely shut down
7 in March of 2014. The business had been winding
8 down since September of 2012.
9 Q. Okay. And there was the freezing of the
10 bank account that precipitated that, correct?
11 A. Yes.
the testimony conitnues,
21 Now, Mr. Strateman, earlier we talked
22 about Bank Zachodni, and you had testified that
23 freezing Bank Zachodni, that when Mr. Norman froze
24 Bank Zachodni accounts, that that led to the shut
25 down of Intersango, correct?
1 THE WITNESS: That led to the Website
2 going offline....
(continued.)
...it was shortly after
17 that the Intersango Website went offline because
18 there was no reason for it to be online anymore.
Patrick Strateman discretely robbed from hundreds of users of millions of dollars in user forked coins on a site he co-founded. He paid the third and only other shareholder 2,500BTC (1.5 million dollars at the time) laundering the payment through a third-party company he worked for. He perjured himself recently testifying that he took down the site due to a banking freeze but documents prove that the banking freeze happened only after and in response to him taking down the site. As of today, he still holds tens of millions of dollars in users coins and has not yet been charged in connection with his crimes.
In reality, court records show I froze banking only after trading on the site ceased and users were no longer able to withdraw their bitcoin. [EXHIBIT 1440 shows the date of request as the 14th of April 2014, and bitcoincharts.com shows the last trade was executed on Intersango in early March 2014] My suspicions that Patrick might not be honoring his commitments to paying people back are documented in the email to freeze banking and in an email sent to Amir Taaki on that exact same day — April 14, 2014 [EXHIBIT 1439]. Taaki, the third co-founder of Intersango, didn't really help out with the site, instead focusing on other projects. Still, him being a shareholder in the company, I reached out asking him to sign a document hoping Patrick would respect a majority shareholder vote and open the books.
I wrote,
from EXHIBIT 1439
"I know 2 programmers who are capable of fixing the issues with Intersango and again, if we agree to something together we can have all the people Intersango owes paid back. If you don't take steps to force Patrick into acting, especially when I am repeatedly offering after more than a year and a half of him failing in his duties than you will become, maybe not as responsible as Patrick, but surely partly responsible for this mess... Let me know if you're interested and I will write something up or if you want you can. You can make any specifications you want as it is fair to me, others and our agreement...Working together could also help me avoid a potential legal battle against Patrick which for all I know would cause him to further neglect his duties. But ultimately, there should be no downside for you in doing this so that Intersango users finally get whatever they are owed.
Sincerely,
Donald"
Amir's response was a single line,
"no, i will meet patrick one on one. I think he has integrity."
Amir Taaki, a self-styled anti-materialist activist, accepted a bribe, laundered through another company, to turn a blind eye to the thousands of users that were owed millions in bitcoin. This laundered bribe would only be uncovered during litigation discovery after contradictory testimony.
I responded to Amir, [still in EXHIBIT 1439 which includes the entire email chain]
"... you should reflect on whether it is right for you to be the one gambling with the claims of Intersango users. You have a moral and legal obligation to them not to act negligent...It would be ok for you to make that call if Intersango owed only you money. After a year and a half, you haven't even set a deadline for Patrick to do even a single thing...Also, if the database, code and other things of value which can be sold (userlist/user informations) get deleted or somehow becomes unavailable in an attempt to steal from anyone including myself as a shareholder or for whatever reason, I will be filing criminal reports."
But this correspondence was in vain. Years into the discovery process, my lawsuit against Patrick uncovered that Amir had just been given what Patrick would call a two-thousand five hundred bitcoin "gift" [Testimony of “gift”], but more on that later.
As Intersango’s trading volume trickled to a stop in January 2014, Amir Taaki refused requests to ensure users were paid. He then received a two-thousand five hundred bitcoin payment on March 18th, only fifteen days after the last reported trade occurred on Intersango. In mid-April Taaki would again reject a request to force Patrick to open the books and ensure users were paid. He said, “I think [Patrick] has integrity.” knowing that he had been paid an illegally laundered hush payment and willfully engaging in a conspiracy with Strateman to hide this payment which was only discovered years later through civil litigation.
In 2022, my suspicions would be proven in open court in San Francisco. Based on Patrick’s own testimony only twelve people out of thousands have ever been paid back. [Testimony of lack of payments] Of those paid, at least a quarter threatened lawsuits, and three had to wait over two years from when they brought their first request. They were often asked to sign releases even when those releases were for partial repayments. Furthermore, Patrick is currently in another lawsuit for converting user bitcoin from a friend of mine and a friend of the company who brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate with us the day that Intersango's new platform turned launch-ready. His response to this claimant and attempt to steal his account balance can be read in his court filing. [Strateman v Hamnett]
But let's take a look at one of those twelve people Patrick did pay back. Hans was the defense's star witness in this matter. Well, he didn't actually take the stand but the following email was projected on the courtroom screen while the defense argued how Patrick worked tirelessly to pay users back.
Quotation from opening statements referencing [EXHIBIT 1496]
In her opening statements, Patrick's lawyer and counsel for the defense Ms. Lyndsey Heaton said,
"In the end Patrick was the only founder of Intersango who stayed behind to fulfill the obligations to customers and to handle Intersango's enormous liabilities. There is one customer e-mail to Patrick. 'Christmas miracle comes to mind. You have restored my faith in humanity Dripping over thoughts and gratitude.'"
However, just further down in this very email chain, one finds the proper context and explanation to the cathartic nature of Hans' response. He had been gaslit and led on for over three years.
"You agreed to return my coins and that's all I ask. It has been months since you have returned anything." and "I know what is remaining". Other emails show he requested his bitcoin at least as early as May 1st, 2014, over three years earlier [EXHIBIT 1441]. Amir said, "[Patrick] has the coins. He is trying to finish the payout system." This is contrary to what Patrick said in court about not being able to pay out after the bank freeze. Hans also opened a fraud case and threatened a lawsuit saying [EXHIBIT 1483] "I have not made official claims against Intersango." and "[T]hank you for finally cooperating...this nearly ruined my life." and [EXHIBIT 1486] "Please don't let me wait another 3 years."
The dealings were so one-sided and stressful for Hans that after three years Hans wrote, "We have not discussed opportunities with the forked coins and I do not care."[EXHIBIT 1496] At the time of that email, the forked coins owed to Hans were worth well over one and a half million dollars. He never received those coins. Patrick would later sell them and pocket the money from forked coins, illegally using them for legal fees and other expenses. Patrick may say this was simply Hans giving him a generous tip. It would be interesting to know if he reported the forked coins in his 2017 tax reports or later when he sold the forked coins of all users.
But, in any event, I know how Hans felt. I know how it feels to be gaslit, to be lied to repeatedly and at the same time time to be told to wait, to not worry, that I won't be robbed. In fact, even once my case against Patrick went to trial, I had no idea what his defense would be with so much evidence against him. Maybe his thinking was that I simply didn't have the resources to spend on a lawsuit and so I was drowned in six years of motions before finally having my day in court.
Counsel for the defense Ms. Lydsey Heaton accused Mr. Norman of threatening to sell the Intersango database. And used a victim who was made to wait three years and file charges and threaten litigation as an example of her client honoring his commitment to paying people back. Her law firm may have knowingly accepted illegally sourced user funds from Mr. Strateman.
Back to our story, why did Patrick say it was so hard to pay back even just a single user? Patrick testified that without banking no one could be paid back. But lack of banking never prevented paying the few users, who, like Hans, knew they were owed. And banking never prevented users who logged into Intersango between 2012 and early 2014 from simply withdrawing their bitcoin. And the few users who were paid back were not paid through banks but through the the bitcoin network. You don’t need to be an expert to know that bitcoin transactions take place on the bitcoin network, not through SWIFT or as an ACH transfer. No, what happened was that Patrick kept the site running on its own in a dilapidated state until essentially the only bitcoin that remained was from users who had forgotten about their accounts. This is when he should have sent out a mass email to users reminding them of their balances. Instead, he took down the site.
Now it might be hard to imagine thousands of people forgetting millions of dollars. But two factors here were at play. One, Intersango had been a huge site with thousands and thousands of users. And two, the dramatic price increase meant that people who had brought $30 worth of bitcoin in late 2011 would, by March 2014, be owed over $5,000 in bitcoin. Today, that person would be owed around $200,000, enough to buy a nice house in most parts of the country. And if you had a mere 30 cents worth of bitcoin in late 2011, your bitcoin would be worth $2,000 today. So already in 2014, when the site was taken down, Patrick owed thousands of people millions of dollars in bitcoin, but now he owes even more.
And at this time, after the site was taken down in April 2014, is when I sent the previous email asking the third shareholder Amir Taaki to work with me and force Patrick to open the books.
Despite the obvious purpose being to prevent the theft of these bitcoin by Mr. Strateman, the defense argued that the sentence “Also, if the database, code and other things of value which can be sold (userlist/user informations) get deleted or somehow becomes unavailable in an attempt to steal from anyone including myself as a shareholder or for whatever reason, I will be filing criminal reports.” where I suggest the database could be sold to another bitcoin exchange to automate the return of user bitcoin and in turn even gain the company some money, would subsequently be taken out of context by Mr. Strateman’s attorneys.
[from opening statements]
Ms. Lyndsey Heaton, "The evidence will also show that Donald threatened to sell Intersango's customer database..."
The defense claimed that I threatened to sell a database I didn’t even have in my possession, presumably to illicit criminals on the dark web. In reality, this fantasy of the defense was simply a self-evident Orwellian distortion of the truth that had its roots in pre-trial motions. Its primary purpose was to prevent anyone but Patrick Strateman from ever laying eyes on the database. I sat silently in the back of the courtroom as this lie was repeated in court with my face projected onto a screen behind a red circle and a red with a line struck through it like a no-smoking sign. The defense never followed up on this accusation and I would love to know if they are still willing to publicly support this claim.
I explored if I could somehow take legal action for this obvious malicious lie but I am told lawyers can say whatever they want in such settings. With their client's case being so bad, quotes out of context, spin and mischaracterization, excessive legal filings and the psychological warfare of such malicious lies is all they could rely on. The hell that I had to put myself through to bring knowledge of this theft to the public domain, well, let's say it was no walk in the park.
Attorney for the defence Zachary J. Alinder filed a motion claiming I threatened to sell the database, the true effect of which was to hide his client’s criminal conspiracy.
It was couple months before my April 2014 email to Amir that I first reached out him on the matter. The site wasn't down yet but trading activity had almost fully stopped. This was an appropriate time to make sure people were in fact paid back and together we might get Patrick to produce the accounting and make sure people were paid.
On January 15, 2014 Amir responded, "I'm under a lot of pressure. Signing something is too difficult.... I don't want to sign anything right now, it's too much stress for me. I'd rather work together without involving law or signing anything."
It was between these two emails, between January 15th and April 14th 2014 [March 18 EXHIBIT 1465] that Amir Taaki would receive a mystery payment, paid for by Mr. Strateman in what Mr. Strateman now terms “a gift”, to the tune of 2,500 BTC, an amount near one third of the amount of BTC Intersango had generated as profit. [Testimony of ‘gift’] Amir would neither mention this 'gift' to me in April when I was expressing concern about the users nor would he mentioned it even after I reached out to him again in 2016 when Patrick failed to distribute the site bitcoin or provide an accounting on the date he finally said he would. Amir knew Patrick had paid him but hadn’t paid me and Amir knew that Patrick had stopped paying users but as long as Amir was being paid off by Patrick, he was willing to lie and go so far as to say he believed Patrick had 'integrity'. Amir Taaki, who promotes himself with the self-styled identity of an anti-materialist activist fighting for the people, may in fact be the biggest hypocrite in the history of the cryptospace. At the same time he was boasting to media outlets of how he had given everything to ‘the cause’ and been left with nothing, he in fact had become a millionaire by accepting a bribe which saw thousands of users robbed of millions of dollars in bitcoin. He was also actively communicating with users telling them not to worry. In the years that have followed, Amir never once disclosed this payment and it only came to light during the discovery period of litigation. Court records show that Mr. Strateman both controls and dispenses the proceeds left of this 2,500 BTC investment 'gift' to Mr. Taaki and has in fact over the years given Amir Taaki an additional 445 bitcoin in separate payments (the 445 bitcoin only coming to light during actual trial despite a six year litigation with three depositions of Strateman).
The truth is, Amir Taaki has never cared about users being paid back and knows there has never been any accountability. I would have done everything as evidenced by my lawsuit and maybe all he needed to do was sign a piece of paper. However, Patrick controlled Amir with payoffs and Amir brushed my claim and the claims of thousands of users under the rug with alacrity.
So after April 2014, having a strong gut-feeling but only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence based on my own personal knowledge, not knowing how many users were still owed or who these users could be, I had no choice but to wait until the time Patrick always maintained the company would be wrapped up, I would get my share of the company profits and these disclosures would be provided. Patrick had always contended this would happen once a lawsuit he was involved in was brought to a close. And in 2016, when that lawsuit indeed came to a close, Patrick asked me to notarize a document [EXHIBIT 1654 & EXHIBIT 1469] indicating a bitcoin address belonging to me. Subsequently, he sent me a test payment saying the main payment would arrive within thirty days. That payment never came and thirty days later my calls were refused. I reached out to his mother who responded with the following statements,
"There is not a great amount left to divide up."
"Today I told Patrick I would help him prepare an accounting for you. But it will take me some time to re-familiarize myself with the business, to identify all those wind-down expenses,"
"... both Patrick and I are quite busy. This will not be an immediate process; there's archeology involved and it will take some time. You'll have an accounting by the end of July..."
As Patrick's mother would testify, Ms. Strateman knew that her son had taken thousands of bitcoin for himself. Ms. Strateman would go on to prepare fraudulent tax returns in 2015 claiming her son had taken the bitcoin as salary years earlier. The true purpose of leading me on and hiding this, and the purpose of Ms. Strateman’s cruel misdirection in pretending she had to do archeology to find out where the millions of dollars worth of bitcoin went, and the true purpose of her son’s asking for thirty days to send the payment seems to have been to buy more time.
Ms. Jamie Strateman forged at least one signiture on financial documents and prepared fraudulent tax returns. Doing so caused would-be regulators to not uncover the financial crimes. Ms. Strateman also acted as a ‘know-nothing proxy’ when in fact she was made aware of the millions in Bitcoin her son had taken and she actively made attempts to conceal the payment as well as trying to buy more time to stave off a lawsuit. (there is no known public picture online of Ms. Strateman. please let me know if you find one that can be used.)
In 2022, the defence would argue that the statute of limitations on my claims had run out. Essentially that I should have known I was being robbed much earlier and brought my claim as early as 2014. Now, while Patrick was behaving unethically, I thought he was fueled by fear of his previous litigation, not greed. While he might have forced me out of the company and made threats, I didn't think he would steal from me or the users. I always believed the the mountain of evidence I had would also mean he would honor his commitment, especially after in 2014 when he, through his lawyers, stated that the site profits would be distributed to shareholders after an accounting.[EXHIBIT 1425] My thinking was, if he wasn't going to dispense the bitcoin, well, he couldn't just magically make them disappear. Patrick would later testify that he paid himself all the bitcoin the site had generated as salary. He never memorialized this payment nor moved the bitcoin until he filed his taxes in 2015 (saying he paid himself in 2012). In fact, the price he declared on his taxes for this bitcoin ‘salary’, if true, would mean that while I was putting in 80 hours a week working for Intersango and while he was denying me payments, he was concurrently paying himself and not telling anyone. He never did tell anyone about this ‘salary’ until he told his mother but he couldn’t recall whether he told his mother of this payment when the ‘salary’ in question was valued in the tens of thousands of dollars or in the millions of dollars. He said he thought that I didn't need to know about him paying himself all the bitcoin the site generated. In testimony, his mother said she didn't think it mattered.
In the end, I was no different then the thousands of users who were going to be paid back once his previous litigation was over. Since Patrick maintains that there is a one to one relationship between the bitcoin owed to users and the Intersango bitcoin he maintains and since Patrick did pay back users who knew they were owed Bitcoin (even if often only after threats of litigation), and since Patrick maintains he paid himself all the site profits and gave Amir roughly a third of that money, why couldn't he have paid back the users before he paid himself and Amir? Why did he hide the fact that he took the bitcoin profits? Why did he and Amir hide the 2,500 BTC 'gift'? Why did Amir accept the hidden 2,500 BTC while telling users they needed to wait? Why did he hide the fact that he still owed thousands of users millions of dollars in bitcoin? Why did he make users like Hans beg for their bitcoin, file criminal complaints and threaten lawsuits? And why did he hide the fact that he took and sold user forks and profited off them?
CALIFORNIA SUPERIOR COURT, SAN FRANCISCO TESTIMONY OF MR. PATRICK STRATEMAN
Q. And so your position is you're holding on to these Bitcoins for the customerse(sic), we can agree on that, right?
A. Yes.
Q. And they forked and then Bitcoin cash coins came into your possession, we can agree to that as well, right?
A. Yes.
Q. And your position is that those Bitcoin cash coins belong to you; is that correct?
A. Yes
In justifying his actions, and in true sociopathic form he later said, "...it's not really how Bitcoin cash stuff worked. It's -- if you had the keys you had the Bitcoin cash."
Chain analysis indicates that Patrick Strateman moved user forked coins. He confirmed selling these coins for personal benefit. Felony grand theft in California under penalty code 487 seems appropriate and the statute of limitations may have only recently started as this crime was only recently discovered. If you are interested in supporting Patrick Strateman’s path to prosecution and especially if you may have been personally effected, please leave your email or contact below. Every last satoshi should be returned. I will be mailing out letters that can be signed and sent in to request for a prosecution and some damn transparency!
In court testimony, Patrick admitted that over time it becomes harder to pay people back. Every day of inactivity means there is less and less of a chance that these user bitcoin will make their way to back to their rightful owners. But still for thousands of days, Patrick woke up and decided not to pay people back, knowing that with every passing year the chances of paying people back would be slimmer and slimmer. He knew that over the course of a decade people die, people lose access to old email accounts, people get married, change their names and people move.
While most criminals are judged based on the crime that they commit on the worst day of their lives, I appeal that if you judge Mr. Strateman on what he did on the best day of his life, or at least of the past eight years, it would be a day where he woke up, knew he owed hundreds of users life-changing sums of money, and did nothing. We know Patrick paid some of the vocal people back who were aware of their claims. He also paid himself and he paid Amir. But Patrick maintains he cannot pay people back while he is in a lawsuit. He is now in a fresh new lawsuit against someone who I personally know he owes. Does that mean everyone will have to wait another few years?
Getting back to user money, it was only in March 2020 — almost four years into bringing a lawsuit and paying around $500,000 in legal expenses, that I was able to see the database with my own eyes and realize the extent of Patrick's theft. Maybe I was irrational. Maybe, powerless to do anything, I desperately wanted to believe Patrick had paid people back all those years ago. Seeing the database had a profound effect on me. But even after seeing the proof, the database was under protective seal and it seemed I could not disclose what I learned. And while I couldn't represent the thousands of users in court, and the judge could not make a ruling on their behalf in a lawsuit centered around my personal claims, much of my case turned into helping users. I felt a deep moral obligation.
I knew then that any settlement between Patrick and myself would likely mean these user claims may never even see the light of day, let alone be paid back. And so I had to wait. All throughout COVID the case was pushed back further and further. From the time I filed my first complaint until the time I saw the inside of a courtroom, six years had passed. Since seeing the database, over two years had passed. Half-way through that wait, one morning, it hit me that a year had passed since I saw the user claims. The world had changed, people were suffering in the midst of a global health crisis, economic downturn and massive layoffs and all the while the State of California forced me to be a member to what I felt was a criminal conspiracy. If hundreds of people are owed life changing amounts of money, there is no excuse to keep it from them. It is hard to think of an honorable person from history who would not civilly disobey such a court order. I was told doing so however would likely undermine my ability to actually legally present this information in open court. To this day, I don't know if I made the right choice. But I do know and I am proud that I made the right choice to not settle before this information became public in open court even though by doing so I put myself through the Orwellian shit-show that is civil litigation. If I hadn't done that, I may never have been able to expose this theft.
At long last, in a small San Francisco courtroom, this information entered the public domain. Only the attorneys, the judge, other staff and I were present. And, as far as I'm aware, aside from the one single lawsuit Mr. Strateman is currently still in, no one knows they are owed these bitcoin. That's why I'm writing this article. Will there ever be any accountability in this case? The self-incriminating documents and testimony lay on a silver platter for any district attorney to pursue. The IRS and SEC should also be interested. To me, as I'm sure it will be to the hundreds of people who are owed life-changing sums, the question is whether the California justice system is willing to hold accountable Patrick Strateman.
I was going to end the article there. There’s so much more I could write but it’s far too long already. Still there’s one last thing that needs to be addressed and that’s Hans. You hear about these white collar crimes like Bernie Maddoff’s. You watch movies like The Wolf of Wallstreet but you’re always separated, removed from the absolute devastation that these crimes of mass destruction have on people’s lives. It’s money, sure, but it’s also trust in the system and even more, trust in people, humanity. If the countless people that Patrick owes are just a statistic that can’t be felt, can’t be touched… then Hans certainly is a tragedy.
Hans died on September the 3rd, 2017. Two days before he died, Hans sent a somber message. Now, I can’t prove what was going through his mind when he was riding that motorcycle. But the man that said, “[T]hank you for finally cooperating…this nearly ruined my life.” had only been given a small percentage of what he was owed. I think when he finally got his first payment he expected the rest was forthcoming but after months of not receiving anything, he would write that final somber message.
“Hello P,
Please man, get me some of my coins.
Thanks,
Hans”
Without any response, two days later he got on his motorcycle for his last ride. I can’t tell you if he was ruminating about the injustice of it all. If he was thinking about Amir telling him over three years earlier how Patrick had his coins and not to worry. I can’t tell you if he had gone to a lawyer and been told that Patrick would argue statute of limitations like he ended up doing in my case and he is now doing in his current lawsuit. Or maybe Hans just didn’t have a million dollars to bring forward a lawsuit not even knowing if Patrick had sold his coins a long time ago. I can’t tell you any of those things but, from my personal experience, I would bet good money on it.
About a week after his death Patrick did respond and in the communications that followed Hans’ wife pretended her recently deceased husband was still alive. I don’t blame her. It was hard enough collecting from Patrick when her husband was alive, imagine Patrick having the pretext of him being dead as a reason to not pay out. These sort of strange communications were not uncommon. This weird power dynamic can be seen in some of the other correspondences to the few people who knew they were owed. I don’t know if Patrick was hoping to extend the statute of limitations in those cases or if he simply enjoys that power dynamic of people begging and being dependent on his good will. Whatever the case, this is not the man who should be blindly trusted to pay people back. There needs to be accountability.
Thank you for spending the time to read the article. If you may have been personally impacted or know someone else who may have or if you would simply would like to know how you could help please leave your contact information at the following page. I am organizing a movement to try to hold Patrick accountable and get people back what they are owed.
The following is an excerpt from an email my lawyers sent to the defense. This shows the steps that Mr Strateman took to prevent me from seeing the database.
The following shows archive.org did not save the site between 2014 and 2018. This suggests that users like Hans who were made to wait years may have only been paid back because of the lawsuit that I brought. Patrick was forced to show he was honoring his commitment to paying back users and as such put the site back up. Despite this, we know almost no users were paid.
Exhibit: (submitted after court testimony) Patrick’s response in another lawsuit where he is being sued by someone he stole from. He is claiming improper jurisdiction. He is claiming he hasn’t benefited (contrary to court testimony). And he is even asking for damages because of defamation. This is evidence Patrick continues to harass users.
