Remember that string of bank failures a month ago? I think we got snookered.
After the bank run that led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, I started pulling at a thread: What if the narrative we were given, that these were issues with regional banking and rising interest rates, wasn’t accurate?
What if the parties that first told their customers to pull out of SVB wanted to cause a bank run in order to cause the bank’s collapse?
There are a handful of powerful tech venture capital firms that had the means and opportunity: If they told customers to pull out of the most popular tech VC bank, they could count on word getting out and the smaller VC firms following their lead, leading to the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars from the bank. But what would possibly be the motive for such a villainous crime?
Little did I know, this thread that started last month in Silicon Valley would take me back decades and across continents as I chased the digital paper trail of hedge funds and shell corporations around the globe.
It would reveal a perfect storm of criminal activity with an unimaginable number of well-known co-conspirators, from titans of industry to technological whiz-kids; sovereign wealth funds to internet troll farms; esteemed universities to media moguls; heads of state to award-winning reality TV shows; global NGOs to poker websites.
It would cast entire industries in a wretched new light, fraudulent since their inception. It would reveal global dark pools of billions of dollars in stolen wealth, concerted media campaigns, and international money laundering networks hidden behind non-profit statuses.
As I pored through interviews, SEC filings, Forbes Midas Lists, and law school case studies, I found myself wishing for a cork board and some string to help make sense of it all. You would do well to question my sanity, just as I have. As one helpful Quora user writes, “When the reality consistently tells you that it does not work in accordance with your understanding of how the universe is supposed to be, take note.”
This has served as a guiding light for me for the last month: While I didn’t want to believe the things I found, the more things sounded like a bad spy thriller, the more our world made sense, from curious donations, public statements, media acquisitions, suspicious travel companions and high-profile resignations to increased surveillance, soaring inequality and inflation, angry political tribalism, the continual erosion of civic institutions and the unprecedented collapse of four banks in quick succession.
The parallels to QAnon can’t be helped (and will be discussed further in a later entry), but I’ve found no evidence of adrenochrome or demonic ritual. Rather, these international criminal billionaires appear to have much more mundane motives: money, power, and control. As it turns out, they’ve gotten far too much of all three.
But I don’t want you to take my word for it. Join me as we follow these threads together, uncover the artifacts that lurk below the surface of the internet, and paint a truthful picture of what we see, no matter the rot it shows us.
We will find things that seem curious and suspicious on their own, and then we will follow the connections that run between them, revealing the largest theft in human history, not yet noticed or prosecuted, that has only grown in scale and power right before our eyes
--
Back in 2013, a mobile payments company called Clinkle got some major buzz: The start-up out of Stanford had just raised $25 million in the largest seed funding round in Silicon Valley history.
And they had some REALLY big names attached, each chipping in a million bucks or so. Among them were a bunch of tech venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, and early Facebook investor Accel Partners, but also Intuit (accounting software) and later Virgin Group (Richard Branson’s empire’s investment arm)
But there were also an unusual number of individuals (as opposed to companies). On the tech side, there was venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, and a VMware co-founder couple. But there was also Rockefeller family advisor Peter Crisp; former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland Dick Fredericks; Ross Perot Jr.; and Stanford Professor Emeritus Bob Joss.
The lead investor, though, is much less well-known: a start-up accelerator called Summer@Highland; apparently a summer program from Highland Capital Partners out of Boston and the Bay Area. Since Google has trouble with the “@” symbol, searching the name yields a whole lot of Billy Joel – Summer, Highland Falls. Now either these tech VCs are no good at search engine optimization, or they wanted to keep this hidden…
Meanwhile, Clinkle doesn’t say much about what their technology is or why it was able to attract such record-breaking investment. Eventually, they say they’ll build an app that uses high-frequency sound to send payments, but they don’t even come close (obviously).
In 2015, seven employees quit due to apparent frustration with CEO Lucas Duplan. As Forbes reported, they had layoffs in 2014, and the departure of several high-profile executives. By 2016, it was clear that Clinkle was going nowhere: photos were leaked of Richard Branson and Duplan setting fake $100 bills on fire back in 2013, and some unnamed investors wanted their money back.
What happened here? Was this a fraud from the start? Did Clinkle just bilk all these investors and run off with the money? Why did such a diverse group of powerful people invest in a mobile payments app in the first place?
We’ll get some big answers to these questions in Part II, but for now, let’s surface something from deep, deep in the rabbit hole: one of the most important and vile documents in modern world history, hidden on a public snooker website.
--
I warn you that it will not take long for you to understand the purpose of this document. The subject matter (child abuse) will repulse you, but it may pale in comparison to the existential dread that will creep in, growing larger with each question you ask. If you continue, your own understanding of the world my change forever.
If you browse the website of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, you may come across their page on Child Protection Policies. It sounds reassuring at a glance: Proper vetting and background checks are being done on children’s snooker coaches.
But if you open the linked PDF, you may begin to wonder why a snooker website has devoted 36 pages to this. If you skim the document, you may find certain passages unsettling:
In Section 3, they offer a long list of actions and behaviors that people should take to avoid the appearance of child abuse. For instance, they note that players should “maintain a safe and appropriate distance with players (eg it is not appropriate for Personnel to have an intimate relationship with a child…)”(6).
Section 4 outlines detailed descriptions of various types of child abuse, along with actions that World Snooker is prepared to take, such as “insist[ing] bullies compensate victims” (10).
Section 5 notes that the first contact that should be made if child abuse is suspected is with the World Snooker Child Protection Officer, not police, EMS or child services. This priority is reflected in two flow charts on how to handle child abuse (16, 19). It is further clarified that contact with police, social services, or with the victim’s parents is “on a 'need to know basis' only” (20).
The document includes pages of discussion around photographs, noting that photos of children can help provide personal information that can be used for grooming them for abuse (8), and that some people take inappropriate photos of children in vulnerable positions at snooker events (28).
Section 7 notes that disabled children are often easily manipulated and may not recognize inappropriate adult behavior, making them more vulnerable to abuse.
As you may have gathered by now, this document is not about snooker, and was not written to promote child safety. Rather, this appears to be an instruction manual on how to blackmail someone by gathering evidence that they abused a child.
It tells the blackmailer how to best identify children most vulnerable to abuse; how to behave in the presence of these children to separate themselves from abuse allegations; how to identify and collect damning evidence of abuse against the blackmail victim; how to confront the abuser without involving the police; and how to leverage the situation to extract money or resources from the abuser.
And it suggests the existence of countless participants in a network of blackmail and child abuse, one with an organizing body and repeatable rules where members are recruited and vetted, and a decentralized online presence.
Of course, that couldn’t be the case, right? Our world has problems, but a vast blackmail network? That doesn’t align with reality. It must be a hoax or a misinterpretation.
Still, you might find yourself unsettled by the questions you start to ask: Why does this document appear to provide blackmail instructions? What’s going on with this snooker organization? And how in the world did researching the bank run lead to this?
Next on Part II: Summer Highlands, criminal recruitment tools, and the birth of FTX.