Having jumped into popular culture with his ruthless practice of hiking vital AIDS medicine prices up by 5,000%, Martin Shkreli is now on the receiving end of some bad news.
As well as being out on bail for securities fraud, Martin 'PharmaBro' Shkreli is also having a bit of trouble with both his credit card and his Bitcoin account. Four days ago, Shkreli was conned out of $15,000,000 worth of Bitcoin by someone who claimed to represent Kanye West.
According to Shkreli, he was in negotiations to buy exclusive rights to West's upcoming album, The Life of Pablo, in exchange for an agreed amount of the crypto-currency. As it turns out, the "representative" with whom Shkreli was dealing with didn't actually work for Kanye West at all, but was in fact a fraudster.
West signed a deal with Jay-Z's TIDAL to exclusively sell The Life of Pablo, beating out competition from Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora. It's reported that Shkreli offered an opening bid of $25,000,000 to the streaming services to give him exclusive rights to Kanye's new album.
This isn't the first time Shkreli's bought the rights to an album just for himself. Last year, he bought the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan's album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, for a sum of $2,000,000 and is now publicly feuding with Wu-Tang's Ghostface Killah.
There's more. Shkreli also took part in a live video chat earlier in the week, during which eagle-eyed viewers managed to read his credit card details and make charges on it. Already, it's been reported that someone purchased a 55-gallon barrel of lube to be sent to Shkreli's home address. In response to the bitcoin theft, Shkreli says he's been in contact with the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, to reverse the payment.
However, people are already calling bullshit on that front as the identity of Bitcoin's founder has been a mystery for years, with the widely-held belief that Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for a group of engineers who created the crypto-currency.
The Internet just gets weirder and weirder with each passing day.
