> So, what really happened in the meanwhile? What made him to metamorphose from a regular security geek into a persistent scammer who claims he's Satoshi Nakamoto? I think this is the real question to ask. There must have been some external forces come into play that made him do that.

Wright's been a low grade crook for a long time. He was sentenced to 30 days in prison in 2004 for contempt after he forged documents to try to escape some non-compete he violated.

The proximal cause of his Satoshi related cosplay is a massive tax fraud. AU has a refundable tax credit for qualifying R&D where they'll pay out around 30% of the money you spent on research.

Wright spun up a bunch of companies that did nothing but claim these credits-- with an intention of claiming around 65 million dollars worth. AU paid out the first round but the next year audited him. Their first question to cut through his obfuscation was "Where did the millions you claim to have spent on research come from?". Bitcoin had just become a big thing in the news and Wright started claiming to be an early miner, pointed to coins from a bitcoin rich list and said they were his, and claimed to have received loans secured by those coins to pay for the research. [There is also a whole separate branch of fraudulent sales tax rebates that he applied for when the R&D credits started souring on him-- but most of the docs on that haven't been made public yet]

Wright created a huge number of forgeries to support his claims and kept expanding the scope until he was claiming to be Satoshi, but the AU tax office wasn't fooled, ruled against him, and demanded he return the money he took.

He'd already spent much of the money, so he basically just took the faked documents that the tax office was too smart to fall for and sought out other suckers to fall for them. Effectively the classic Nigerian prince scam, offering people a share of his fortune if they could just help him overcome his short term cashflow problems.

There is some indication that he'd been engaging in this R&D credit fraud for up to a decade before the enormous applications that got him caught-- he's recently published R&D credit applications for fake projects (basically just applying for R&D funding for concepts he saw posted on tech mailing lists) going back to 2002-ish. So either these applications are recent forgeries or he's been funding himself through fraud for at least the last 20 years.

The relatively uncertainty about the earlier possible fraud there is that for the big 2013+ tax fraud much of the tax office documentation has been made public as a result of a civil lawsuit against Wright, so for that we can be pretty sure what happened... but for things other than that we just have Wright's statements to go on, and Wright is a fantasist and pathological liar that constantly makes stuff up even when its not to any advantage to him.