Welcome back everyone. I am Cass PNC.
I'm joined as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett
Tomlin. How are you today?
Oh, I'm doing well. How are you, Cass?
I'm doing good. We are discussing something near
and dear to both of our hearts, I think, and I mean that
legitimately today as opposed to sarcastically like most days.
We're going to be talking about some of the tools that we
utilize on a day-to-day basis more or less to look into
companies and individuals that are involved in a lot of the
investigations that we conduct. For example, let's just say
someone like Justin Sun or a company like Tether.
So we're going to go ahead and just take a look at some of
these tools, how we use them, show them to you guys so that
you have an opportunity if you ever feel like it.
If you're doing some sort of due diligence or you're interested
in a company before, I don't know, before investing or before
talking to someone about them, if you're interested in any of
this stuff, this should give you some sort of leg up on at least
understanding something about them.
At this point, I think it'd be good for Bennett to kind of talk
to us about just the beginnings of, of how he ends up
investigating or what many of our viewers might end up doing
if at the very first steps of looking into a company or
person. One of the first things I want
to talk about is that sometimes it can be a little tricky to
figure out what company you're actually dealing with here.
Let's start with this generic company that we've perhaps
talked about once or twice on this podcast before Bit Fenix.
Now, if you just go looking in corporate registries for the
string Bit Fenix, you're going to miss most of the relevant
corporate entities because very few of them are actually called
Bit Fenix. However, most companies will, on
their website, give away what the actual name is.
Sometimes it'll be down here in the footer.
If you look at the copyright information, this tells you that
it's tied to ifenix Incorporated.
Alternatively, you can look at the terms or conditions or the
privacy statement and we can see here.
This site is owned and operated by Ifenix Incorporated and its
affiliates including BFX WW Incorporated, BFX NA
Incorporated, One is said Leo Limited and Ifenix Financial
technologies Limited. And once you kind of have this
set of entities, you are at a good place to start, especially
if like Bitfinex is really generous in this case here where
they're even giving you like the specific corporation numbers and
where they're registered. Not all places are going to do
that, but at the very least having the actual name for the
company is a good place to start because then you can take that
name to places like Open Corporates, which I think Cass
wanted to talk about open. Corporates is pretty great in
that you can definitely use it for free.
You don't need to sign up. I'm sure there's some benefits
to becoming a power user for something like this, but
generally you can just type in companies or for that matter
officers so. We'll go ahead and put.
Officers this time Bennett brought up just now Bitfinex and
Bitfinex, we, we happen to know who their officers are.
I think there it might be listed on their on their company
website. Still, if not, we, we happen, we
happen to know who they are. So we're going to go ahead and
type in one of their company officers into open corporates,
Giancarlo Devicini. And we're going to search all
jurisdictions. We're not going to try to hinder
what we are shown. And there you go.
Giancarlo Devicini. That's new, actually what I
mean. So I mean, this is a kind of a
perfect example. I haven't looked for Giancarlo
Devasini probably in a very, very long time.
He's listed twice in this database, one with a Canadian
company. Generally, Canadian companies
have these, this weird numbering thing instead of actually going
by names. So this is not no longer active.
But in the past two years, he has apparently created a company
called the Cryptocurrency Association.
It is a nonprofit and it is located in California.
Now, we can't obviously be 100% sure that this is him.
There could be another Giancarlo Davasini creating cryptocurrency
related companies, but we're going to go ahead and type in
this, although I want to pause there.
So what this provides us is it does give us an address.
This is likely Bennett, are you seeing this?
This company's address is 6547 N Academy Blvd., USDT Bank LLC
which is news to me that there is something called USDT Bank
LLC in. Colorado, I have follow up
questions. I have follow up questions that
we wouldn't normally be recording.
What? I'm very like, hopefully you're
gonna cut all of this. Yes, I'm not putting.
Shocked to do I found this. Like.
The agent with the last name Son on USD USDT Bank LLC Yun Fang
Son. Dude, so okay, Anyway, look,
we're kind of falling down a rabbit hole right now because I
haven't looked Ben and I have not looked for Giancarlo
Devicini on Open Corporates in a very long time.
Obviously finding this odd company right now, this non for
profit is is throwing both of us off.
Now the beauty of what this does is that Open Corporates provides
us a link to the California Secretary of State.
So now we can actually type in cryptocurrency association
search for it, it should pop up here it is.
And then so I would have to have an account with to view this,
this document with the, the state of California actually
probably had that not logged in right now.
But basically you can find out what's going on with this.
It is that is available for us to figure out.
We now know more about Giancarlo Devicini, at least when it comes
to his nonprofits located in America.
Now is that everything that we can find out?
Of course not. There's plenty of other officers
companies that we could type in related to Bitfinex Tether
executives there and see what's going on with them, what their,
what associations they have and try to go from there.
So this actually provides you with a huge amount of
information, like kind of a shocking amount of information
that you can utilize to actively search for these individuals.
Now, I will say Giancarlo Davoscini is well known for
being involved with Tether and Bitfinex.
I am not aware of the cryptocurrency association or
his involvement with it. So what this is showing us is
his involvement in AUS non profit.
It isn't showing us his offshore activities etcetera.
A few days ago, you saw it. We discovered this on camera
where we were just trying to show our audience some of these
tools and we in, in real time, discovered something we've never
seen before. Now it involved tether and
tether executives, and you can only assume where my mind
immediately ran when I saw that. And but this is the.
Beauty of what we're trying to teach you guys is that not only
do you can you use the tools, which is great, and it, it gives
you all of all of this great data and information at your
fingertips. And that's lovely, but you need
to know how to navigate that once you've acquired that
information. And that's what we were able to
do with this story. So hopefully we'll we'll link to
it in the YouTube and on the in the podcast information so that
if you want to follow along with us while we talk about this
right now and how we did it, you can there's a Protose article
about it. So we'll include that Protose
article in the information. But Bennett, after we saw after
I looked up Giancarlo Devasini and saw this company in in
California pop up, can you kind of talk about where, where it
went from from there, just at least the beginning of it?
Well, there was a bunch of strangeness around it like we
mentioned while we were recording several days ago, part
of it like the address was USDT bank over somewhere in China
associated with a company in Colorado as well.
There was like name changes to like names of other
cryptocurrency companies as well.
And then we started looking at some of the other non tether
executive names that were associated with this entity.
And like what we found was that there was a civil Rico lawsuit
against one of them from Google alleging they were like pig
butchering scammer who was running a bunch of fake things.
There was like. And just a pause in case I I
think people have probably watched our Zeke Fox episode,
longtime listeners. Probably have, but just to
recap, pig butchering is this scam basically where it involves
human trafficking more or less where people are put into big
apartment blocks in Myanmar or Cambodia or Laos, basically
Southeast Asia. I'm sure there's other places
too, maybe the Middle East and and other areas where you can
kind of get away with this stuff if you keep your cool and your
wits about you. And so pig butchering is when
you take all these human trafficked people, force them to
work on this scam and steal money from people, whether it's
through fake cryptocurrency apps and being the helpful support
desk or it is a love a love romance scam.
But yeah, I just wanted to fill everybody in on what pig
butchering is. Sorry.
So yeah, Sun Yun Yun Fong is being sued by Google civil Rico
case about pig butchering. Go on.
And then one of the other names on that same list also was like
someone who had been charged with a crime.
And so then when we started to see these things, it seemed
increasingly less likely that these were actually the tether
executives participating. And if it was the tether
executives participating, it was really important we figure out
what was the context of what was going on here.
And when you started to look into this a little bit, Cass,
you came across some of the corporate loopholes that made it
possible for this whole thing to come together.
Yeah. And I understand a lot of states
operate on a good faith filing policy.
I, I assume just to keep paperwork to a minimum, but
there are certain there's got to be ways to do this better than
the way it's the way it's currently implemented.
But yes, basically using the tools that we already were
showing everyone, I found these names on open corporates,
realized this was a California-based company, went
to the California Secretary of State website, went search for
corporate filings from this company, found these corporate
filings, and then found the people actually involved.
And once you find out those other individuals and you start
looking them up and finding out that they're involved in these
pretty serious scams, it leads you to start wondering about the
mechanics of the policy in place.
So basically these guys were able to do this because when
they put all the names of these tether executives on, the
corporate filing for this is not an LLC, this is some kind of
other domestic corporation. When they put all these names
on, they just lied and said, yeah, all these tether
executives are working with us, we promise.
And they cross their fingers behind their backs.
Now, is this illegal? It is.
It certainly is. The California Secretary of
State's office told us that it if you're if I'm a if I were to
do something like this, try to do something like this, I would
get charged with perjury. And that can carry certain I
like you can do jail time, prison time for that.
It is it can be a real serious charge.
But one of these gentlemen is a Chinese national and he lives in
China and he ain't getting extradited for this.
And so the question becomes what it, what is in place to try to
stop this from happening? And they were semi
sophisticated, for what it's worth, because in California you
can't name a company bank, for instance.
So what did they do? They, they created that company
in Colorado because Colorado doesn't have a law explicitly
stating that you can't name a company bank.
Like they, they were sophisticated enough to know
those corporate rules and set up these companies in different
places within the US. And I don't know what the
repercussions will be, but I, I do think, yeah, let's let's dig
a little deeper because I think it's important for everyone to
recognize how we were able to as quickly as as I think I was very
much like, oh, I'm going to run with this is going to be crazy.
I'm going to run with this story within, I want to say 12 to 24
hours. I had done enough digging to be
like, oh, this is definitely not tether.
But yeah, let's talk about more of that.
Like what other things did we have to do?
Because this seemed so extraordinarily strange for this
person being accused of being a pig butcher to be on this random
association with these tether executives.
There was a bunch of due diligence steps that we had to
go through and then that protos had to go to, to report this
out. Reaching out to the Secretary of
State's office to like confirm what the policies are and like
how someone could possibly take advantage of that.
Talking to someone at the attorney general's office about
like how they manage the potential criminal aspect of
some of these activities and trying to even reach out to
Tether themselves was able to state on the record that they
had no association with any of these firms, which seems to be
the truth. This isn't the kind of thing
that Tether involves themselves in at this point in the arc.
And so like you have the, and this is a good reminder we had
the initial moment of, oh, this is a really strange Tether
thing. What is Tether up to now?
And the answer is nothing. Tether was not, as far as reason
can tell, involved in any way, shape or form with this.
This was another set of scammers trying to use Tether as a cloak
of legitimacy. That's right.
And I don't you, you made this point.
It's not. And I and I and you cleared, you
cleared it up too. So I don't want to in a sense,
Tether is one of the victims in this.
They are not. They're not a real victim.
Nothing was stolen from them and ultimately there is 0
reputational damage to the company.
Tether realistically, like even if, even if the companies or the
individuals that did get scammed think of Tether when they think
of who scammed them because of the involvement that these guys
pretended Tether had. Ultimately there is very little
damage done here. But I do think it's important to
note that the Secretary of States office and along with the
attorney General, like they aren't checking this data.
And the only way for Tether to get their names stricken from
those corporate records is for them to have someone reach out
and file complaints, which is insane.
I, I don't know, like, how else to think about that other than
it shouldn't be the we shouldn't put the burden on the victim of
what what amounts to identity theft.
We shouldn't put the burden on them to prove that it is
identity theft. It should have been clear that
this was identity theft. So I do, I yeah, I do think
it's, it's important. Also, we're known as being
tether critics and and skeptics. So reaching out to them and
essentially working with them to stomp out someone who was
actively trying to pretend to be them was a different place for
us to be. But it also tells me that we do
what we do because we care about fraud more than some well, the
enemy of my enemy is my friend or something like that.
Like, you know, you don't want to think about that or think
like that as a a journalist or if you are just trying to look
for information, you also want to try to be objective.
Obviously, again, we come in with a bit of a, a tilt when I
find that when I find that information, I'm thinking, oh,
tether's up to no good again. But to give, to give yourself
the space and the time necessary to back off from any initial
bias, I think is a good exercise for anyone to to have because we
all have that bias when it comes to anything.
So, yeah, I think like a lot of good lessons were not
necessarily we these are things we practice regularly, but
practice in good lessons took place and we somehow were able
to record it in real time, which I think is great because now we
can share this moment with the audience.
Again, a lot of due diligence though went into this five days.
We didn't find it and immediately post online like,
look, looks like tether executives are in involved in
this shady company in, in California.
Like, no, that's not the right way to go about this.
And if you want to do your research properly, you got to
you got to actually get into the weeds and get into the muck.
And sometimes it's boring. Sometimes it's frustrating when
people don't call you back or don't e-mail you back or refuse
to speak with you. But these are steps that you
have to take. Otherwise, you're going to make
mistakes and you're going to look foolish.
Yeah, I think that's a good point.
And it emphasizes points we've made before in places like
episode 100 in places like that. And like just before we end this
little cut in, I was it was really interesting to see the
kind of inner workings of this part of this likely scam.
And like this is speculation, but my speculation is that the
reason they're doing this is so that when they're targeting like
larger whales for this scam, they had like legitimate
corporate documents that had like no names in the industry on
it that they could use to try to defraud people.
And it was really interesting to me to think about like that Ave.
as a way to like do this type of fraud on this type of scale.
So that even if someone who was like the actual victim of this
type of scam tried to do due diligence, they could be
presented with legitimate corporate records that list
people's names. And even if they went further
and went to like the California Secretary of State website and
and like search that company name and pulled it up, they
would see that same set of names.
Like there was a lot of deliberate steps here to take
taken to like, make due diligence on that part hard.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's a, that's
an excellent point. And I think this is another
thing that I didn't, I didn't really think about this.
But you know, part of what gave us pause, what was a couple, I
was like, well, there's no way Heather's due diligence
department is worse than me about like suspecting these two.
Well, maybe for maybe, maybe when they didn't have a
compliance or a due diligence team at all.
You know, maybe back then you and I were outpacing them for
sure. But nowadays, I don't think that
we could compete with whatever compliance team they have in
place. And they are working with the
Secret Service and the FBI and all the three letter agencies
and stuff. So I don't think we could
compete with them any longer. And I also was like the I, I
don't doubt we know that bit. Fenix and Tether have worked
with unsavory characters before, but these characters weren't
those kind of unsavory characters.
They were just the bottom rung of scam artist.
And it like there was no incentive for Tether to work
with these people. And I think our familiarity with
this subject matter. Is a huge reason that we.
Were able to pause and be like, whoa, this is sloppy and a mess.
Even for tether. This doesn't make sense.
So I I do think there's like a lot of layers to it and a lot of
levels and I hopefully this doesn't poison the rest of the
episode. I think these tools are
important. Learning to use these tools are
are it's important, but there's also just spending the time and
practicing and learning about the subject matters and how to
use the tools and how to take the time.
And you can't learn that overnight.
You can't learn that in a week. You can't learn that in a month
like this takes a significant amount of practice and time and
you're going to make mistakes. You know, journalists are humans
and I I think it takes a really long time to get good at it.
So don't expect to start utilizing these tools and
instantly be a private investigator or something.
But again. A really good foundational
structure for finding these people.
I can now keep going on the corporate stint here because
open Corporates is going to show us state to state.
It's going to show us, it's going to show us some specific
countries sometimes. But what it won't do is show you
other places. So this is again, like I, I just
want to go ahead and go here. Let me share this now.
So now I'm looking at what is called Companies House.
This is the UK version essentially of, of open
Corporates. And So what we can do here
again, I don't know. I might as well, just for
continuity purposes, type in Giancarlo Devasini.
And as far as we know, he's not an officer for any companies in
the UK, so nothing should come up.
Right. Nothing.
But we do know, and let's bring up a, a perfect example for
this. There's somebody who goes by the
name of Christopher Harbourne. This gentleman, sometimes he has
other names. This gentleman has been involved
with Tether and Bitfinex and also helped fund Brexit.
So this was the number one financier of Brexit, Christopher
Harbourne, also known as Shakrete Sakuncrete, that is his
Thai name. He is a Thai citizen as well.
He currently has what what they're telling us is that he
has two appointments. And so we're going to go ahead
and Scroll down. We're going to Scroll down and
you can see that this is the gentleman who we named, right?
And how do we know? Well, as I just told you, his
other name is Shotcrete Sakuncrete.
Well, that is his Thai name. His country of residence is
listed as Thailand here as well as here.
And it tells us when he was appointed to these.
It was in 20/18/2016. It's giving us information about
his companies in the UK. There's AML Global Payments,
which I believe is his aviation fuel company.
And then there is Cambridge Advanced Research Alliance,
which I don't think anyone has done any reporting on.
Let's go ahead and click it. So if we click Cambridge
Advanced Research Alliance, we soon find out that this is a
private limited company by guarantee without share capital,
use of limited exemption. We find out that it's up to
date, everything is OK with it currently and we can go ahead
and click people if we want to find out who's involved.
We already know that Christopher Harbourne is involved, but now
we find out that Catherine Mary Harbourne, Christopher
Harbourne's sister, is also a director.
She has resigned apparently. So she resigned in 2021.
So now it is just Christopher Harbourne and sorry Joanna
Armenanen, who was appointed in 2018 as a director, Finnish
apparently living in the UK. So now we have some sort of idea
about the people involved. Now we can click people with
significant control. We find out that that is 3
active people. Now Christopher Harbourne's
sister is no longer a part of this.
Oh, there she is, yes, ceased. So we have a apparently a Thai
citizen, a Finnish citizen, and Christopher.
As people with significant control, we can go to filing
history. And the beauty of the filing
history is that we can see things like when the exact date,
when his sister stepped down as a person with significant
control. So we can look at exactly when
the incorporation occurred. And when we click that, we can
actually see. So now we can see this is
actually the incorporation like exact corporation date.
And we can find out kind of some distinct things about it.
We can find out who was involved the day it became a company.
We can find out if we Scroll down everyone who has shares, we
can find out what we got. Articles of like.
All this stuff is usually pretty nondescript.
We don't need to worry about it. I think this is all kind of
legalese, but yeah, you can, you can go through and click any of
these things to find out extra information about this, where
they're registered, who's involved, and you can try to
find out more about them after that.
You're not going to get a ton of information from this stuff.
You will get people involved, their whereabouts, where they're
from, and whether or not they have a controlling interest in
the company. All those things are actually
quite important and I think that this is a great resource for,
again, figuring these things out.
It's why all three of the things that we've discussed so far,
whether you're going on the website and finding out the
company names and people involved or using open
corporates or company's house to try to find out more information
about these individuals or companies, where they're
incorporated, how they're incorporated, what industries
they're involved in, et cetera. Yeah, that should do it.
Well, and I think like the thing to remember is that the UK is
somewhat unique in that they allow free and relatively
unfettered access to their corporate registry, but it's
valuable to check the corporate registry often wherever you're
looking. Like I know I've been able to
report on a few stories by going through a six, which is the
Australian registry there. You have to pay for most of the
documents, but the documents you do get are pretty detailed, like
down to the specific shareholders and things like
that. Similarly, both Cass and I have
had been able to report stories by pulling documents from ICRIS,
which is Hong Kong system. It is not easy to use.
It is easy to spend money that you didn't realize you were
spending, but it is possible to get useful documents from it.
And so once you have the corporate name and have moved
through the broader resources like open corporates or and
things like that and you've identified what country it is,
if there's more information you need to know about that entity,
going to that country's corporate registry is generally
a good place to start. Yep, I agree with all of that.
And I also think obviously you're right where the 1st place
is to go to the website and just kind of check other company
names, the real company names essentially because they're,
they're usually doing business as something, they're
incorporated as something else. And then after you have that
information you, that's when you can actually start to explore on
a more comprehensive scale. And it's again worth noting,
like you, you can delve into corporate documents.
It will often cost you money even in the United States
sometimes to access, Yeah, to access these corporate
documents, right. If it's in specific states, it
will cost you money. And the reality is in a lot of
states like Wyoming, you're probably not going to get very
much information from any of those corporate documents.
They specifically create their their corporate structure to be
very privacy focused. Now, if it's in a place like
Florida, Florida's great. You get free access to their
corporate registry and they tell you like everything.
You get like almost complete access to every document they've
ever filed with the Secretary of State.
You can get specific detail about shareholders and members.
Florida is a good place if you're trying to do research on
that type of thing. So after we've learned a little
bit about the company, what's the next thing we should do?
It depends on what kind of company company it is.
If for instance, I think maybe I'll, I'll pass this one off to
you, Bennett. But if it's AUS, let's say AUS
publicly traded company, where, where would you go next?
What would be the next move in your opinion?
Like Cass was saying, when you're dealing with publicly
traded companies, you can search all of their SEC filings by
going to the SEC search, which they call Edgar.
I don't know why they call it Edgar.
It's apparently an acronym. But like if we look up micro
strategy, we can see their current reports, they're insider
trading reports, they're different registrations of
sales. And so if I'm trying to
understand like their most recent financial situation, I'm
going to look at their most recent filed quarterly reports
or updates like that. And I want to, I, I just want to
put this out there for everybody, but don't expect to
jump into these filings and be like, oh, this is very clear and
easily understandable. I can decipher this very
quickly. These things are complicated.
There's a lot of moving parts. There's stuff that even to this
day I do not understand. Bennett and I have recently been
talking about convertible notes and stock warrants, which are
just a complex mess. But there's he's he's looking
through this right now and you can just see it's numbers on
numbers on numbers. It even the idea that like it
looks like we're talking about thousands.
Well, we're not, you know, this is in millions or in whatever.
Like there, you really got to know your math and know what the
hell is happening before you can even try to publicly comment on
what these reports are suggesting.
Well, I know from experience. You can try publicly commenting
even before you really fully understand them, but it's
helpful to spend some time trying to understand it.
So yeah, this is helpful to look into things about different
companies. The other one that can be good,
especially if you're doing something like crypto research
or financial research, is looking for their money
services, business registration. What does Coinbase have theirs
under? Oh, here we go.
Like if we want to look at coin bases, we can see all the places
they are registered. We can see their address that
they're registered at when it's valid for and we can even
download that registration and take a look at it.
So registered out of their address in New York, they are
registered in basically probably every state for activity.
I'm not going to count to make sure that all the places are
there, but they're there. And so it's, it's good to do
that. Sometimes those types of things
will include a little bit of extra information about the
company, like based on where they're registering it or things
like that. And so starting to look at what
I think of as regulatory filing. So like going through Edgar,
going through Vincent, going through things like that helps
you make sure that the company is like valid, current and like
up to date, right? That if their money services
business, they've got that registration.
If they're a public company, they are up to date with their
filings. And when you check the Secretary
of State or the corporate registry, sometimes you'll even
find there that companies are behind on their filings, and
that can be useful information. And that's that's with publicly
traded stocks, I think or sorry, publicly traded companies, I
guess some private companies as well.
It depends on who they're acquiring money from, whether
they have to file with the SEC. If it's a company that isn't
necessarily a publicly traded company, maybe it's mostly AVC
related VC related company. That's when I would suggest to
people to explore something like Crunchbase.
Now, I will say that I have an account, so I am able to kind of
utilize it in a better way than some people might be able to.
However, if we look at a company like Tether, what I'm able to
ascertain from this is that they have made 13 investments.
They've had three exits. I can get employee profile
pages. Some of these might be old or.
They're sometimes a little questionable.
The crunch basic the like the investment hearts is good.
The employee profiles can be a little ISO raising.
There's some confusing bits about this, like they say it's
located in Seattle, WA. That's wrong.
There's a different company called Tether that is located in
Seattle, WA. So like there are things that
you have to, you have to know what you're getting yourself
into when you're using a site like Crunch Base because there
can be plenty of errors. But as Bennett pointed out, the
investment part is generally pretty reliable, Reliable.
So we go here, we can see how many investments over what
period of time the investments were made and whether or not
Tether was a lead investor. Lead investor simply meaning
more or less that they were one of the higher capital, one of
the companies that put in a larger amount of capital into a
raise. And they'll tell you the most
recent investment for and how much the raise was for.
That doesn't mean to keep, to be clear here like this says, oh
they, they went into a company called X Rex and raised 8 which
raised 18.8 million. Well, that doesn't mean
necessarily that they raised $18.8 million from Tether.
It means that they raised that in total and that Tether was a
lead investor. So if we go down here, you can
see it says lead investor. Yes, it was a corporate round.
And so if we click this now just to just so everyone has some
sort of idea here again, if we click X Rex, we can see even
though last round they made 18.8, they've actually total,
their total funding has been for 42.8 blockch.
It tells us what they do, where they're located.
Again, these are things we need to double, We need to double
check, right? We cannot, we cannot rely on
Crunchbase to accurately suggest this company is located in
Taipei. It very well might be, I don't
know, but it will tell us their total funding amount and over
what amount of time and how that money was acquired.
So we can see that the majority of their funding was actually
through seed rounds, but their corporate round most recent is
when? That's when Tether gave them.
Tether gave them million. So we can see there's been a lot
of investors in this company. There's been roughly 21
investors or so. Maybe some of these are
duplicates, but there's been something like 20 investors.
There was only one investor in the corporate round.
It was Tether and they gave 18.8.
So these are these are things we can ascertain.
It helps us understand connections.
It helps us look into other companies.
It helps us kind of, I guess it depends on the company, but it
definitely helps you get an idea of like what they're investing
in or who is investing in them. And I think all of those things
are quite valuable, quite valuable for us.
So I, I've, I've, I've had a lot of good value from crunch bass
as much as I think I don't know who created it.
Is this Michael Arrington? Is it?
I do not know the answer to that.
I think it might be, and if it is, that feels bad, but yeah,
regardless it is quite useful. I I'm glad to hear that
Arrington did at least one useful thing in his life.
I'm I do think it's funny that he's like created his fund and
called it XORP. Like everything is XORP and just
like how embarrassing that is. But anyway, yeah, let's continue
here outside the fact this this actually something that Bennett
is going to show you right now is far outside the scope of what
we were just discussing, even though it's it's pretty
applicable to everything. So go ahead.
Court listener recap search is an incredible tool because what
they do is they like index every single docket in the United
States federal courts. And whenever someone who's a
free law member with the recap extension like I am, goes and
spends money on pacer like I do, it copies that document and
uploads it here. So that way when you want to do
something like look up Sam Bankman Freed, you just type in
his name here. Give it a minute to search.
Because it's a nonprofit, things run a little bit slow and then
we can find his docket here, throw it into sending and we can
see. Let's find a good one.
You can open up the PDF filings and read like these specific
court documents and things like this.
And in any case where there is not a document yet, if you have
a PACER account, like again, I do, you can just go directly to
PACER and then it will like automatically prompt you to buy
and upload the file, which I'm not going to do right now
because that's just a notice of attorney appearance.
But this lets you like actually read and understand the
multitude of court cases going on at any given time.
Well, lets you read them. Understanding is a separate
issue you have to deal with yourself.
Bennett just mentioned Pacer and, and I will say Pacer is a
ugly system and it is all about value extraction And it like I,
I dislike everything about it. But I will say that again, it is
quite valuable. And if you can afford it, OK.
And I, I totally understand there's plenty of people out
there who can't it, it can be expensive.
As Bennett pointed out to me today, if you spend over $35 in
1/4, is it every quarter? It's something like that and it
might be 30, but there's some minimum you can spend up to each
quarter where you don't actually get billed.
And to be clear, like it's $0.10 every document or something?
Every page. Every page, right?
Every page. So if a document is 65 pages,
right, you're paying like you are paying 6 1/2 dollars just
for that 65 page document. So it can absolutely get
expensive, especially if you're really trying to keep up on some
big important case. And I, I don't want to suggest
that everyone can afford, afford it.
We have the benefit of working for a organization that is in
the media space. So we tell them we bought this
thing, pay us back for it. If, especially if it applies to
something we're writing. Not everyone has that, but
sometimes it can be well worth your time, your money and your
energy to go for it. You know, it might be worth it
for you, especially if it's some small case that isn't being
reported by the media in general.
Like if it's something you're really fascinated by.
I don't know it just, I just think it's worth it to have a
pacer account. So I want to, I want to put that
out there. Yeah, I, I will add also it's a
pacer account is a good thing to get ahead of time because it
takes a while to have an active pacer account.
You put in your information and they mail you a physical like
confirmation code that you have to type in.
And so there's like a weak leg at minimum from when you say I
want to pacer account until you're able to start reading
dockets. So if that's the thing you think
you might need coming up, start getting done it.
So and now I know we're going to start getting into some other
kind of blockchain exclusive tools that people can utilize.
But before we do that, I just want to utilize one other thing
for everybody. So I know, I know that there's
going to be qualms about this and people suggesting, you know,
the New York Times is garbage. Look, I have my issues with the
New York Times as well. I am not suggesting, I'm not
suggesting that everyone should go out there and immediately go
by a New York Times account. The reason that I have an
account personally is less because I want to it.
It's less because I want to read their current articles about, I
don't know, some Biden advisors are discussing how to persuade.
I don't give a shit really. I truly don't care.
Not only do I not care about this, but I don't care about.
The first thing under their masthead.
All of it all, everything about this does not appeal to me.
OK? I just want to be upfront and
and honest about that. But what does appeal to me is
there archives. They're archives because they
are the the new, the newspaper of record for America for over
100 years. You can utilize this archive in
ways that you can't necessarily utilize other archives.
So I'll go ahead and type in a company that is again near and
dear to our hearts, Deltec. And if I type in Deltec, we're
finding stories from 1968. Deltec banking raises profit.
We're finding stories about Deltec.
The shoestring one is fun. Yeah, Deltech shoestring laces
continents, Deltech encircles the world.
Deltech sees profit for first quarter January 18th, 1972.
We get all of these these interesting stories that could
teach you a lot about something that you do not like.
Deltech still an an important Caribbean bank that is involved
in all kinds of weird stuff and you know, you can search through
here and find some really interesting stories about
Deltech from decades past. Now does that apply to Deltech
now? No, it doesn't.
I don't think it does. I don't think it's fair for me
to utilize a story from 1978 to discuss the current situation.
It does provide you with some sort of archival concept and.
Sometimes it's great for some company that you're looking into
and you need something from 5 or 10 years ago even, right?
Like so I do think there is a lot of value to be had there
from the New York Times archive. Does that mean that you need to
go out and immediately buy a New York Times subscription?
No, and I'm not suggesting that, but I I I have found it quite
useful for myself. Their cooking coverage is also
pretty good. Yes, but that's for you and me.
I don't think that's necessarily.
But you know, Speaking of archives, it is very helpful to
be able to kind of look at the past for certain things.
And so like, say you were a person with an unhealthy
fascination with stable coins and so you wanted to learn more
about the very beginning of the very first stable coin we're
getting called Tether, the first stable coin.
It works for most definitions of stable coin.
And so it can be like interesting and helpful to go
back and see how these companies were marketing themselves in
2014, in 2015 in things like that, see what questions they
thought were going to be important for the firm and
things like that. And like, in doing this, you can
often like, find changes, see, like at what period they added a
certain executive to the website, took a certain
executive off the website, changed the way they were
discussing certain features or things like that.
Yeah, talking about, they remove the part where they talk about
how you can get tethers without going through the KYC process.
At a certain point, you decide you don't want that listed on
your public website anymore. But thanks to wonderful tools
like the Wayback Machine, assholes who are obsessed with
stable Queens can still find it and go back and mention it for
years to come. You know, it's things like that
that can be really helpful on these archive websites.
Yeah. And so also similar thing, like
sometimes you can see like a corporate entity change at 1.3
years ago they were referencing 1 corporate body, now they're
referencing another one. Now you have an opportunity to
figure out was there a merger? Was there like every domiciling?
Why did this change and does that mean anything?
Did a bunch of new investors come in and it's not really the
same company it used to be, they're just using the same
name. Those kind of things happen.
And so looking at how it's changed over time helps you kind
of figured that kind of thing out.
Yep, Yep. I think that's awesome.
The last, the last ones I I have no other ones on my docket.
I think the last couple are all you but Bennett or the last
three. This one right here is called
Built With, and it's a little bit of a funky one.
It's not going to apply to everything, but what it does is
it tells you what technology a website is built with, what
libraries are loaded, which hosting providers they're using
and things like that, which on its own can be useful for
finding things. I don't have the advanced
features, but what's most useful on this website to me and is one
of their free features is their relationship tab here.
And So what this is showing us is the different like analytics
IDs, so Google Universal Analytics and Google's newer
analytics, What tags have been associated with this website and
what other websites have those been associated with?
And so like you can see other websites that have overlapped
with this man, there are some nonsense on here.
What is going on? I thought the.
Scammers. Well, scammers are are probably.
Yeah, yeah, I guess so. I guess what's happening here.
Yeah. So I think what's happening here
must be that some of these scam websites are like copying and
pasting the whole source code of the Tether website, including
the, like, analytics IDs. And so when they stand up their
website, it's being tracked into the same analytics IDs because
most of these are not things you would expect to be associated
with Tether. Yeah.
More commonly what you'll see in this kind of thing is it'll help
you kind of, you'll see like a cluster of companies that all
use the same marketing firm or something like that.
And so again, it's just another tool to start piercing through
relationships. In this case, I think most of
these are scammers who are like copy and pasting the source code
and therefore copying and pasting the analytics tags.
Which also tells you something about what the what they're
used. Like it tells you that Tether is
a essentially a payment service, right?
Like that's why they're getting copied and scammed or copied by
scammers in in in such a way. Yeah, and this will also show
you perhaps more valuable the IP addresses for the hosting.
And so sometimes here overlap can be more meaningful.
Early on in Tether's history was more common for them to use kind
of shared hosting and stuff. Now their addresses are
basically only associated with their domains because they're a
more serious company now. Wait, I say that then what is
this don-m.com? Interesting.
Not the point, but like this can is another way to help you kind
of piece out some relationships. The last two tools I kind of
want to talk about are the only two tools we're talking about
today that actually touch on the blockchain, and one of them is
the blockchain explorer. For whatever your blockchain of
choices, Ether scan is probably the best.
Yeah, there might be. Like if you're, if you're a
Solana user, there's soul scan. If you're if you're a Tron user,
there's a Tron scan. There's usually if it's a a well
known blockchain, it will have its own kind of scanning site.
Exactly. And what that lets you do is
take an address that you have that you found somewhere, and
look at who is that address transacting with?
What kind of tokens are they transferring in and out?
What kind of assets have they like held over time?
This is one of Justin's old addresses.
It's mostly abandoned now, except to hold a bunch of value.
What kind of tokens do they still hold and things like that?
And so this is like before I had the more advanced tool I'm about
to show, I did like entire long blockchain tracing things, just
carefully following transactions through blockchain explorers.
This one funded, this one, this one Co spent with this one,
etcetera. And like gradually building that
up. And you can do that just with
the blockchain explorers. And really dating us here.
I think you and I both started utilizing blockchain explorers
with Omni more so than Ethereum. So we were, we were because Omni
was the main chain of choice for Tether.
We were utilizing Omni Omni scan which I don't even I'm not sure.
Omni Explorer it. Does and it was quite useful for
us back then. It was great actually.
It was really, really, really useful and getting, getting
proficient in utilizing these these things, while it's not as
good as some of the tools that you can use, as Bennett is about
to show, it is pretty like if you're, if you're proficient, it
can be really, really useful for you.
Yeah, yeah. And then if you are doing more
advanced blockchain analytics, I've had really good luck with
bread crumbs. They have some inexpensive
tiers, relatively inexpensive, I think like five to 10 bucks a
month that give you access to like Bitcoin and Etherium.
And then they have ones that scale and price beyond that up
to those targeted at organizations.
But like you can take an address you have like that, plug it in
here and start to see what other addresses are we sending to?
What other addresses are we receiving from?
How are those interconnected? What do the transactions coming
into and out of this look like and things like that.
All which help you kind of gain a better understanding of where
this address sits and how it matters or if it matters.
Again, this is a little bit more of another one of those advanced
tools. I think blockchain analytics is
not something even a lot of people who want to investigate
crypto really need to necessarily use a tool like this
for. You can get really far just
using like regular blockchain explorers and things like that.
If you picture yourself someday being the next Zac XPT, then
yeah, start cutting your teeth on bread crumbs.
Get a little comfortable and spend some time making sure you
understand how it works so you don't end up making a bunch of
crazy claims online like metallic Buterin funded the
Chinese mafia or whatever different people try to claim
sometimes because they don't know how to read these things.
Spend some time, look at the transaction.
Remember, anyone can send anyone, so receiving from
someone doesn't necessarily incriminate someone.
Spend some time, look at it, think it through, but can be a
really useful tool, especially as you get into more kind of
advanced blockchain analytics. Yeah, I would.
I would say always for everyone, no matter what tool it is.
We mentioned whether it's the New York Times or bread crumbs
or whatever, if you can utilize it for free, utilize it for free
to the fullest extent that you possibly can.
And if you feel like you've either accumulated enough value
from it or or need to utilize kind of more complex tools that
they offer to find out more than I would, I would recommend, you
know, just just ride it until you can and and when you're
ready to pay for it, pay for it. But all of these tools hopefully
prove to be be quite useful for everyone.
And like I assume most people are quite familiar with most of
these already. But if you're not, hopefully we
introduced you to introduced you to a tool that you'll be able to
utilize in the future at some point.
And these things can be really intimidating.
But I do want to add that like Cass and I are almost entirely
self-taught in this regard. There were some people on
Twitter who helped us out or introduced us to some of these
tools early on. But in terms of like their daily
use, it was mostly just like trial and error working through
it, trying to understand it step by step and going back over it
and back over it. And I think that lots of people
can benefit from trying out this kind of thing.
And I think practicing this kind of thing makes like the useful
skepticism we talked about way back in episode 100 way easier
and way more like natural. When you have some familiarity
with how to vet certain types of claims or how to look into
certain things, it is way more easy to be an effective skeptic
at that point. Yeah, exactly.
Like instead of it, I think it's really daunting to actually be
skeptical in general. I think you and I feel far less
like there is no daunting. We don't feel daunting at all
when we're sceptical because we can utilize any of these tools
to instantly be like, is my scepticism founded or am I
crazy? And if you start, you've been
crazy. I mean, you, you, we're crazy
for sure. But it we can, we can at least
stop ourselves from from announcing it publicly by
utilizing some of these tools. And I will add that this will
not always be possible. It is helpful to have a partner
in crime where you can text them or message them and go hey am I
crazy or is this what I think it is?
And having someone or a couple of someones who are on the same
journey as you who are willing to go.
I think you've misread that completely.
Can help you avoid some embarrassing missteps.
Yeah, and and you know, this is another thing I think X has like
if you're just starting on, on Twitter X or whatever you want
to call it, it's far less useful than it used to be.
But Bennett and I were able to grow followings to the point
where we can at this point, again, I think this is we, we've
benefited from timing on this, but we can reach out to people
or publicly say, I don't understand this thing.
I would love if someone who does understand it could talk to me
about it. And we actually get a response.
Now, not saying everyone is going to get that, especially if
you're new and you have like no followers on X or something like
probably no one's going to see your, your call to help.
We have been able to utilize that a lot.
And I will say that experts are often quite responsive.
And it's, it is worth it's it's worth at least shooting them a
cold e-mail or whatever, even if they I don't respond and don't
get upset with someone if they don't respond.
People are busy. Like don't be an asshole.
I think it's worth reaching out to these people just to at least
be like, hey, I don't know this, could you help me?
And oftentimes you'll find out that they'll be like, sure, I'd
love to help. So, yeah, I mean, this is the
best summary Bennett and I can give.
I know that we've had Zac XBT on before to discuss like other
cryptocurrency tools and and how to be careful in general when
investing or putting money into crypto.
So feel free to listen to that episode if you're so inclined.
Otherwise, please don't look up Cascoin on any of these tools
that we've talked to you about.