Hodlonaut pays up: The bill is growing for Craig Wright’s detractors

Magnus Granath (aka Twitter user Hodlonaut) has paid Dr. Craig Wright another £140,000, CoinGeek has learned. The amount concerns Wright’s ongoing defamation case against Granath and brings the total amount received by Wright in the case to £210,000.

The latest tally comes following the outcome of his English Court of Appeal victory in January, where he succeeded in convincing the Court to overturn an earlier High Court decision barring Dr. Wright from suing Granath. That earlier decision was made on the basis that Granath had managed to start preemptive proceedings in his home country of Norway.

Now that it has been overturned, Wright’s defamation suit will proceed in the United Kingdom, leaving Granath on the hook for the legal costs associated with the appeal. He had already paid £70,000, and the further £140,000 was due by 29 January. It’s a hefty sum for Granath, who was given the opportunity to offer a retraction before Dr. Wright issued proceedings. The bill will only grow as the case continues.

Granath is the latest of Dr. Wright’s detractors to discover that openly calling somebody a fraud on Twitter can be very costly. Blogger Peter McCormack was ordered to pay Dr. Wright legal fees in the amount of £18,500 for a last-ditch attempt to have the defamation suit against him delayed and now appears to be racing towards another victory for Dr. Wright. BCH’s Roger Ver was also served with a defamation lawsuit after fleeing to Antigua.

CoinGeek will be providing coverage on developments in these cases as they come.

Follow CoinGeek’s Crypto Crime Cartel series, which delves into the stream of groups-from BitMEX to Binance, Bitcoin.com, Blockstream, ShapeShift, Coinbase, Ripple and Ethereum—who have co-opted the digital asset revolution and turned the industry into a minefield for naïve (and even experienced) players in the market.

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