[5][6] In July 2024, a British High Court judge referred Craig Wright to UK prosecutors for alleged perjury related to his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto.
[11] Wright was an adjunct academic and researcher at Charles Sturt University, where he was working on his PhD entitled "The quantification of information systems risk".
He was sentenced to 28 days in jail for breaching an injunction that prevented him from approaching customers of DeMorgan Information Security Systems, from which he resigned in 2003.
[27] Wright is the founder of cryptocurrency company DeMorgan Ltd., which claimed to receive $54 million AUD in tax incentives via AusIndustry.
[40] Jordan Pearson and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai said that "Wright simply reused an old signature from a bitcoin transaction performed in 2009 by Satoshi.
[44][45][46] Wright told Finder in 2019 that bitcoin's creation was a group effort, that he drove the project, and that Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney were involved.
[48] A spokesman for Wright told the Financial Times that this was "the first government agency recognition of Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin";[49] the United States Copyright Office issued a press release clarifying that this was not the case, and that "the Copyright Office does not investigate whether there is a provable connection between the claimant and the pseudonymous author.
Wright was also ordered to transfer half of the partnership's intellectual property as well as pay Kleiman's reasonable attorney fees in bringing the motion.
Wright took the position that verdict served as a vindication of his role in inventing bitcoin and stated that he would not appeal the jury's findings.
[59][60] In May 2019, Wright started using English libel law to sue people who accused him of lying about being the inventor of bitcoin, and who called him a fraud.
[citation needed] In the case against McCormack, the High Court judge was not asked to decide whether Wright is Satoshi, as by the time of the trial McCormack was not defending his statements on the basis that they were true, but as the judge found Wright "not to be a witness of truth" who had "advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial" he awarded him only £1 in damages.
[62] In June 2019, Wright filed a libel lawsuit in the UK against a Norwegian bitcoin user, Marcus Granath, known on social media as "Hodlonaut".