Introducing: Coining It with Lewis Goodall | Ep 1 - Unmissables: Explosive Lies

0:01This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

0:30down. It's called Coining It. I've been following the trail to find out how far one man went when the money felt endless and what happened to him and all those caught in its wake when it all came crashing down. So this is episode one of Coining It and if you want to hear more, all the episodes are available now on Global Player or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the link in the description of this episode or of course you can just search for Coining It. I really hope you enjoy it.

1:04In the faded glamour of a British seaside town, a man sits alone in a shabby bedroom. It's cold and damp. Almost every house around here has black mould. The only light comes from his computer screen. This is where we find James Parker. Mid-50s, wispy grey beard, living on benefits. Hour after hour, day after day, he sits here, clicking through websites, solving tedious little puzzles because he thinks he'll win a reward. The smoke from another rolled cigarette hangs in the air. To anyone looking in, this was just another life being lived in quiet desperation in Britain's most deprived town where men have the shortest lives in the country.

2:03But then, one day, James Parker notices something. Something that shouldn't be possible. He stares at the screen. What he's seeing, it can't be real. But it is. James Parker, a man who has very little, has just stumbled upon something that would give him everything. A secret that will change his life forever and drag those close to him down a path none of them could have predicted. Some secrets make you rich, some secrets destroy you. This one does both.

2:54This is Coining It. Episode 1. Things get weird in Blackpool.

3:10Let me start all of this by welcoming you to, in a way, one of the main characters of this story. Blackpool. A big, bold, yes, brashy, northern seaside town where Britain comes to let it all hang out. Even if you've never been here, you can imagine it perfectly. miles of sandy beach, amusement arcades, candy floss, ice cream. It's got it all, the quintessential English seaside town. And who needs Uber when you can just hop on a donkey ride?

3:46And it is a very, very familiar sight to me because I spent so many of my own childhoods wandering along with a sense of wanderlust for this place as a kid. and it is just so evocative, the smells of it, the hot dogs, the chips, absolutely soaked in vinegar, donuts absolutely covered with sugar. It is so wonderful. In its heyday, it was the destination for millions who flocked to see the town's famous tower and its incredible winter light show, the Illuminations. So the minute you do switch that switch, the whole of the Pia has been a light on.

4:34Nowadays, its reputation is perhaps a little more checkered. If I'm honest, it's a place that doesn't always make sense. A place full of grandeur, albeit often faded and phased, which is next to the gaudiest of tat, where true poverty, some of the very worst in Britain, somehow seems to sustain a noisy economy, which rain or shine never quite stops, always somehow keeps going. So, the perfect place to live, I suppose, for a man that doesn't quite make sense. The man at the centre of this story. A man called James Parker. Did you ever hear about the Blackpool Bitcoin millionaire? Yeah, I did, yeah.

5:18You hear tales of him everywhere, and you know what they say? Well, some of them are true. as you walk down the seafront. It's one of those very folk wars around here. It's like a folklore. It's almost like a legend. In certain circles, yeah. In the pubs. 18 months, two years ago, we were having a quiet drink one night in Wellespoon. We got chatting to this guy and he came out with this tale about him being a guru on bitcoins. It seems everyone has got a story to tell or half a memory of James Parker. And the story usually goes something like this. He looked totally unremarkable, a kind of crumpled silver surfer, but it seemed like he was a man of limitless means, able to throw cash around to anyone if they were even so much as nice to him, even for a moment.

6:13No one quite knew what to make of it. There are, though, a handful of people that know more than anyone about this elusive man. Because they were there right from the beginning. I've dropped round to meet two of his close friends. But the first greeting that I get at the gate isn't Amy, the person I've come to meet. He's excitable. It is a muscular, a very muscular, grey staffie. Come on. Come on. Oh, go in. Nice to meet you anyway, Lewis. Nice to meet you. How are you doing? Amy Burgess ushers me in. And once we'd found a spot squeezed among the many plants in her living room, I started by asking her what the best thing about this town was for her.

7:02Oh, shit. It's a horrible town. It's just not very nice. It's all the druggies and everything. You've got all the drunks. It's not a very nice place. If I had a choice, I wouldn't live here. Maybe we could just start by just going over the moment when James first came into your lives. In a pub, maybe. I'd known him for years. And I used to go around his house for cups of tea. I knew some of his other friends, do you know what I mean? We'd just socialise and I'd take him shopping and that. Poor little James used to come up to my house on a mobility scooter wearing rubber gloves in the rain. He was a right comical little character.

7:38We struggled to get him out of the house, didn't we? Before everything. When he got the mobility scooter, that was... I don't know if he loved it. He could get out and about. That sort of changed things quite a lot, didn't it? I remember him letting me drive it and just shouting, Retina, no! Because it was on dead fans. Also huddled here on Amy's sofa is her good friend Loretta, a bit younger than Amy, but who also knocked about with James. The first time I met James, he was struggling with his bags, so I helped him in with them, made him a cup of tea, made him sit down, catch his breath again, and just sort of started looking after him from there.

8:14Can you remember what your first impression of him was when you saw him that day when you met him? That frail old man. He was just a fragile, wasn't he? Yeah. That proper frail old man. I just needed some help. He was all on his own too. So it was completely accidental? Yeah. Just to run into him one day? I wouldn't call it an accident, because I believe that everyone has their own path. I just think that me and him were supposed to cross. James Parker couldn't easily walk a hundred yards. He was jobless and he lived on benefits. Still, with Loretta and Amy, he did have friendship. James had come in the front room and I was asleep on the couch and throw a quilt over me.

8:52Like, rub my head on his way out. No, he treated her as his daughter. He was brilliant. Yeah. He was part of the family. He was part of the family, wasn't he? And though he didn't have much, he had dreams. Big dreams. Do you remember when he got them chakra stones and he used to sleep with them down him? They seemed to help him a lot. He used to have chakra stones? Yeah, and he used to put them on his point. Wow. And he'd sleep with them, like, in the palm of his hand. And he used to love them. he'd sit on the end of his bed in the morning and he'd shout me in and I'd bring his cup of tea and he'd be like, right, what are we asking for from the universe today?

9:23It's called something. Manifesting. So he's like, we need to manifest what we want from today. Do you remember the gold bowl? Yeah. He had a gold bowl on his table and he said to anybody that would come in the house, if you've got any old scrap gold, put it in my bowl and one day I'm going to be rich. Yeah. Wow.

9:47James Parker had other oddities. Loretta remembers how he'd eat mushrooms raw from the fridge. And though he may have lived much of his life at that time between his bed and his sofa, James was not stupid, far from it. In fact, everyone who met him would agree he was clever, really clever. Of the few possessions he had, the important things were his computers. and what was more important was how he set them to work. Because before most people knew anything about Bitcoin, James Parker was trying his best to mine them back when they were worth almost nothing. He was a bit eccentric and he'd have his little computers, you'd go up his house and you'd hear all the fans and I'd be like, turn it all off, how can you deal with it?

10:37And he'd be doing these penny click things constantly. And I never really understood. I thought he was mad as a hatter. All this Bitcoin nonsense and everything. And he'd been playing with that for years and years, mucking about with it. He was just mining. And I'd be like, you can't sleep with it. Oh, yeah, I like the noise. And he'd enjoy it. It was like he'd go to his house, his window would be open because all the fans were blowing. It's what he enjoyed. He'd spend hours and hours just pressing buttons. So let's take a second here. Bitcoin, the digital currency that depending on who you ask is either the future of currency or a stupid, perhaps even crooked investment that your mates have just bought into, boring you endlessly about how they're making proper cash off crypto.

11:24Telling people that you do crypto, telling people you make money online, most people don't get it. They're envious, they hate on you. Come back in a few years, you got a house, you got a Lamborghini, whatever the fuck. And those voices got much louder in 2024 when Bitcoin surged in value. The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world. Going to the moon. The only mistake you can make is selling it. It's simply not the case. You literally spent a million pounds of actual money on Bitcoin. actual money in May this year, I made 1.2 million profit from this profit.

12:09Whatever your view, they are valuable and generally speaking have become even more valuable, even if crypto can be a wild ride. Making a full Bitcoin, actually creating a digital coin takes a lot of computer power. It's not really the kind of thing an ordinary person can do at home. But what an ordinary person can do is collect up tiny fractions of bitcoins. The way people do that is through something called a faucet website. You know, as the Americans would say, a faucet, like a tap that drip, drip, drips just a little bit at a time. The deal with these sites is that you perform some action, like you click an advert or maybe solve a puzzle.

12:57You know, those things where you have to click on all the correct bikes just to prove that you're not a bot, that kind of thing. And then you're rewarded with a tiny fraction, eight fragments of a Bitcoin that's yours to keep. And I do mean tiny. Do that enough times, though, and maybe you can build up your Bitcoin holdings. now perhaps unsurprisingly people get obsessed with this and one of them who did was james parker back in that flat in 2015 but don't take it from me take it from the man himself this is james parker i was collecting bitcoin for free for years my old computers i used to have five right with with loads of different browsers on them, with tabs open, you know what tabs are.

13:51I'd say I have eight tabs on one browser, eight tabs on the next, whatever would fit across the screen. And I would be clicking them constantly, all day long, every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, every two hours, whatever the time limit was, click, click, click, and collecting a reward of cryptocurrency. All of this naturally racked up his energy bill, something James had tried to solve with the old trick of fiddling his electricity meter, nearly setting fire to it in the process. Undeterred, he'd then sign up to a crypto trading website, a website called Coinspot. Tell me about the trading on Coinspot then.

14:36How does that work? Right, you buy and sell. Okay. Buy Bitcoin, sell Bitcoin. Buy Bitcoin, sell Bitcoin. And you make a profit with each trade? Yeah. Profit? Well, I mean a little. What we're talking about around this time is literally pennies on the pound. Tiny slivers of Bitcoin. Until one day, James notices something that changes everything. He's in his flat, striking up another cigarette as the remnants of the last ebbs in his ashtray He takes a swig from a tin of lager that's gone flat and squints hard into the glow of his computer screen It's the only thing he's been doing all day He clicks to make a trade on CoinSpot offering to sell a fraction of his Bitcoin but almost immediately he decides to buy it back Hmm, that's weird The money's come in to his account from selling it.

15:37But oddly, it's cost him nothing to buy it back immediately. That's, well, that's free money, isn't it? So he does it again, deliberately this time, trying to time the two actions almost at once. Which is weird. He keeps saying it's weird. Yeah, it does. What was weird? Is that the... What was weird? If you were sat there watching it, you'd go, it's weird. It's actually understandable. The number's going up. The number's going up, and it's just weird. It's just weird, and it works. I don't know. Is this really happening? Could this website really have a simple flaw, a glitch that's made him able to effectively create an ever-rising Bitcoin balance.

16:36Basically, a license to print money. His throat tightens and he coughs. His mind, what must have been going through it? Racing between fear and bliss. He sinks flat onto his bed, arms out wide, with a fag still in his lips. James Parker, a sick man living in penury. has just struck gold. But would anyone notice? Surely the website people would see that something was wrong, wouldn't they? Should he tell them that he's made free Bitcoin off their site? Or maybe just not?

17:34My name's Dave Wainwright. Back in 2018, I was a detective constable, relatively new on our economic crime unit. And now all of a sudden, about eight years have passed and life is different. Would it be fair to say that the series of events that brought this case to your attention was unusual or weird? I mean, what were the chances of it all happening? It was totally and utterly bizarre, like nothing else.

18:09The first time that you've bought your own currency for sale, the glitch, was the 23rd of June 2015. Were you aware of that at that time? No. Okay. When were you first aware that this glitch existed? Not sure. Okay. From what I've been told, he would spend nearly 24 hours a day in bed in his mouldy little rented council flat, just playing with websites, trying to make a small profit, buying one currency, selling it in exchange for another. and it looks like he used the glitch several times over the years before he actually realised what was going on and at that point he's absolutely spanked it.

19:04Now, there's someone very important, central to this story I've got to call on. On one street behind the main promenade, behind the noise of the trams and the steady jangling of the fruit machine payouts, I drop in to a cafe to meet a young woman who knows Blackpool well. A young woman who got caught up in this story in ways that still haunt her. Six years on. I'm really into the history of Blackpool. And when Blackpool first became a resort, it was where all the rich people came. And over the years, it's slowly become, you know, a mismatch of the upper class and the working class and some of the lower class.

19:46This is Kimmy Caton. She's in her mid-twenties, has tattoos, dyed red hair, piercings, and loves her punk music, as well as her history. As she's waiting for her iced caramel latte, I ask her if my suspicions are true that in this great British seaside town beneath the gaudy veneer and the fun of the fair, there's always something a bit subversive, an undercurrent of something, a world unseen. Yeah, Blackpool definitely is like that. I think because it's a town that's so vast, there is always something going on around the corner. It doesn't just seem that way. It really is like that.

20:27Being by the sea was just so wonderful for me. I adore being near water. I was always a water baby. That's what my mum always said to me. I was always a water baby. Ah, mums. What would we do without them? You see, it's not just Kimmy who'd become central to all of this. It's her mum too. So this is where we meet Kelly Caton, Kimmy's mum. What would people think of when they think of your mum? She is very intelligent and really creative. She did this thing called happy pranks. So she would shout us downstairs. downstairs, we were in our rooms and she shouted as if she was telling us off. And we'd come down and she'd set up a tea party.

21:17A big pot of tea, sandwiches, cakes, that kind of thing. I remember when we were young, she would always decorate for birthdays. So there was one birthday party where it was all cowboy themed. And she built this huge totem pole out of the inner tube of a carpet and you know she's paper mache and paint and that's that's what i remember from her more happy moments was that she was always very creative if she wanted to do something it had to be done there and then she got these wild creative ideas in her head and just really wanted to get them out um very determined but you know what it's like with teenagers they can be pretty determined too and in recent years things haven't been quite the same for Kimmy and mom Kelly I was I was very volatile I myself have suffered with mental illness and it definitely heightened when I was a teenager so there was lots of arguments and ultimately our relationship ended shortly before all of this happened when she asked me to leave the house.

22:38And, well, that's the way it still is. We haven't spoken since the day that she kicked me out, which was coming on six years now.

22:50Their backstory is complicated. The relationship between Kimmy's mum and dad was not a happy one. There were lots of problems in the house, serious ones, and the days of birthday parties and fun pranks that Kimmy remembered earlier seemed gone for good. My mum's mental health just slowly went downhill. And particularly after they separated, you know, she was a single parent, living on benefits. So that's really how things got so bad for her. As far as I can remember, through all of my teenage years, she was very depressed. Kimmy says that that depression started eating its way into family life.

23:32With joblessness came poverty, with poverty came cold, and with cold came damp black mould creeping through their crumbling Blackpool home. Kelly would confine herself to her room and disappear into doom scrolling. Any time I would pop my head in to go and speak to her, she was always researching or watching a documentary about a new conspiracy theory. one that she liked to wind us up with was that she didn't believe in the concept of gravity not that she didn't believe that gravity existed but we just had so many of these debates and i think it started as a joke and then she started to take it herself like very seriously and i'd just sort of nod and say yeah okay she loved reddit there's such a vast array of information on there and so many different subreddits.

24:22And I would assume that one day she just found herself on the cryptocurrency subreddit and started looking into it a bit more. But how did she describe it? Like, what was she saying about it to you? Like, was she saying that this is like the future? This is something that everyone's going to get their head around? What was it? She really believed that cryptocurrency as a whole would be the future of finance. You know, we would do away with paper notes and the way that banking is done now. And that crypto would be the future of all of that. That's definitely something I remember her talking about.

24:58Just enjoying it. It wasn't a way of making money. It was something that was new and interesting. I'm very into research, you know, forums and things. And these Bitcoin forums were full of all different ways of, you know, making Bitcoin and things like that. So I was experimenting and playing around and enjoying it.

25:21when I made my first fight into how big time was the thing to do I was sitting in my room for 24 hours a day doing nothing so I figured I'd do that that is Kimmy's mum Kelly and look I can sort of understand this Kimmy's told us that her mum's nerves were just really bad so it was just easier to hide away clicking on scammy Bitcoin sites, dreaming of some new world order, because anything had to be better than the one she was in. But sitting around, well, that's not Kimmy's style. She had a life to get on with, which included, importantly, her boyfriend. So I was dating Jordan at the time, and he worked behind the bar at the North Euston Hotel.

26:17And he came back to our house one evening after work and just had hundreds of pounds in tips. I remember I was sat on the floor in our dingy little living room and he was just counting it all out and me and my mum were just sort of looking at each other very confused by it. And Jordan said, there's a guy who's staying at the hotel and every time he would pay for a drink he'd pay with a 20 pound note and then tell us to keep the change so i was a bit skeptical about doesn't happen every day yeah that kind of stuff just doesn't happen in real life you know that's that's a storybook kind of character so i felt a little bit uncomfortable an older gentleman you know giving so much money to a younger man and maybe if there were any false intentions behind it.

27:10I just sort of wanted to suss him out. So I went either the following day or, you know, a couple of days later to meet James and meet Jordan after his shift. And I remember introducing myself to James and saying, oh, I'm Jordan's girlfriend. And he said, you know, yeah, I've really taken a liking to Jordan. He's a lovely young lad. And he said, you know, what are you drinking? I'll buy you a drink. You know, I accepted just because a drink's a drink. Why not? And I said to him, I was totally honest. I was like, look, I just sort of wanted to get a feel for you because you are essentially just throwing so much money away.

27:51And he asked me at that time, what do you know about bitcoins? And eventually when I went up to buy a drink, he stole my purse and threw loads of money in there, which I didn't realise until I'd gotten home. Well, you just shoved your purse for the money. Yeah, I don't remember exactly how much it was, but I remember getting home and opening my purse and there was just bills in there. Again, that doesn't happen every day. No, yeah. So that is how I was introduced to James. But what did you think when you got home, you saw that money in your purse? What did you think that was about? I mean, it must have in some ways stunned you, right?

28:28Yeah, I was very confused. I didn't really know how to react to that. I didn't want to spend it just in case, you know, if he wanted anything from that or from me for giving me that money. Where do you think he was getting it from? Did you have any idea or were you just... At that point, he was very vague in the fact that he made all his money from Bitcoins. That's really all he said. He told me he was buying and selling Bitcoin, and that's how he made his money. I was just confused. I really didn't know how to feel about it at that time, because I didn't know if there was any ulterior motives behind it.