Chapter Thirty-One: Machines That Do Not Exist

The first vehicle was the simplest and the ugliest: Bitcoin ATM distributorships.

Two pages and a rendering. Crypto was going mainstream. Ordinary people needed a way to buy it with cash. There would be kiosks — in shopping centres, in service stations, in pubs — and the machines would take a transaction fee, and the fee would be split.

You could buy a territory. Sunshine Coast. Northern Rivers. Perth metro north. A territory came with a guaranteed allocation of machines, installation support, a revenue share and five years' exclusivity.

The territories sold. A man in Rockhampton paid eighty-eight thousand dollars for two of them out of his mortgage redraw and told his wife it was a franchise.

The machines did not exist.

This must be stated plainly, because it is the one scheme in the entire catalogue with no ambiguity in it — no clever argument about the difference between an option and a lot, no we always disclosed the risk.

There was no supply agreement. There was no manufacturer. There was no unit anywhere on the surface of the earth, in a warehouse or a container or a workshop, belonging to that scheme.

A distributorship is a right to distribute a thing.

Sell one for a thing that does not exist and you have not made a bad business decision.

You have taken money for air.

His internal account — given sincerely to at least two people, one of whom repeated it to a journalist — was that the machines were coming. There was a supplier in China. You pre-sell to fund the capital build; anyone who understands business understands that.

There is a version of that argument that is legitimate. It is legitimate when the money sits in escrow and is applied to the build.

In the eleven weeks after the Rockhampton payment cleared, the account it landed in disbursed to: a marketing consultancy in Southport with an overlapping director; a charter company; two months' rent on a villa in Seminyak; and forty thousand dollars in cash withdrawals in amounts under ten thousand, across nine days.

The man in Rockhampton rang thirty-one times over fourteen months.

He kept a log too. Everybody in this book keeps a log. That is what victims do — they document, meticulously and uselessly, in the belief that a sufficiently good record will eventually summon a sufficiently interested authority.

On the thirty-first call, somebody answered who had not been briefed. And she said, brightly, with no idea what she was detonating:

"Sorry — Bitcoin ATMs? I don't think we do those. Did you want property?"