When I present him with this very banal answer, Broeksmit is not convinced.
He is constantly creating new tokens and watching their value skyrocket and then decrease a few days later. However, the reality of what is going on eventually catches up to him. On February 19, his wallet balance is zero. (Mine too.) His anger at Incognito is monumental. He says he paid some of his friends and acquaintances with commemorative coins and now those people are angry with him. “It’s a nightmare,” he says.
As well as his custom tokens, he says he lost all the money – in mainstream cryptocurrencies – that he originally invested to pump up his custom currencies. On one of our calls, I try again to get an exact figure for his losses, but he doesn’t say it. “I can’t tell you that just yet, Marie is getting angry,” he says. Peter-Toltz in the background suggests leaving the room, but Broeksmit holds her back. “Just everything we had,” he adds.
Then it’s quiet for a couple of weeks apart from the occasional news.
On April 5th at 6pm London time I get a call. It’s Broeksmit. He sounds upset. All is lost, he says. They lost the court case, they were evicted from their attic. Most importantly, Peter-Toltz is absent. “We wanted to park to sneak into our house – and now I just can’t find Marie,” Broeksmit tells me. “She’s gone.” I suggest Peter-Toltz might have stayed with some friends. “Friends? We don’t have any friends now,” he says.
It is now clear that Broeksmit fell in love with a mirage. Wracked by personal adversity and financial difficulties, he had reached for a miraculous solution and found the get-rich-quick delusion that permeates the worst corners of the cryptocurrency world.
Court documents later revealed by Motherboard show that Broeksmit was killed a day after our last interaction, on the 9th. A “ghost gun” with no serial number was found in his car. Shortly thereafter he is released. Four days later, on April 13, he enters the property again. Then a long period of silence – until April 23, when someone from Broeksmit’s Signal account texted me. It’s not him. The text reads: “Marie has been found and now we must find Val, who is missing.” I ask who is writing. Nobody answers.
On April 25, Broeksmit’s body was found on the grounds of a high school not far from where he used to live. An investigation into the cause of death is still pending, and initial police reports rule out third-party negligence. The LAPD officer in charge of the investigation is not responding to an emailed request for comment. Marie Peter-Toltz is currently a missing person, according to the California Department of Justice, despite what the anonymous texter told me, and she has not responded to my texts, emails, and Twitter direct messages. Inevitably, Broeksmit’s death has become fodder for a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists eager to see the death of a former whistleblower the work of an evil cabal.
But I feel like I knew the man behind the whistleblowing persona, who often took pleasure in asking about mundane things like my dating life while sharing wild claims and big stories. The news of his death shocks me. Broeksmit’s plan for crypto-alchemy had backfired, sending him into a spiral that ended with his life being ended. I was left with a story I promised to write and pieced it together by going through reams of texts and emails and hours of conversations with a man who desperately wanted to be taken seriously.
“Be nice to us when you write about it,” says one of Broeksmit’s last texts. “Please write me fairly.”
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