When I put this very mundane answer to him, Broeksmit is not convinced.
He keeps creating new tokens, watching their value skyrocket and then deplete a few days later. But the reality of what’s going on eventually catches up with him. As of February 19, his wallet balance is zero. (Mine too.) His anger at Incognito is enormous. He says he paid some of his friends and acquaintances with modified coins, and those people are now mad at him. “It’s a nightmare,” he says.
In addition to his custom tokens, he says he lost all the money — in mainstream cryptocurrencies — that he invested in the first place to pump up his custom currency. In one of our calls I try again to get an exact amount for his losses, but he won’t say that. “I can’t tell you now, Marie will be mad,” he says. Peter-Toltz, in the background, proposes to leave the room, but Broeksmit stops her. “Everything we had,” he adds.
Then it goes quiet for a few weeks, the occasional text.
On April 5, I get a call at 6pm London time. It’s Brooksmit. He sounds upset. All is lost, he says. They have lost the lawsuit, they have been evicted. Most importantly, Peter-Toltz is missing. “We were parking to sneak into our house – and now I just can’t find Marie,” says Broeksmit. “She is gone.” I suggest that maybe Peter-Toltz went to stay with some friends. “Friends? We don’t have any friends now,” he says.
It is now clear that Broeksmit had fallen in love with a mirage. Plagued by personal setbacks and financial difficulties, he had reached for a miraculous solution and found the get-rich-quick delusion permeating the worst corners of the cryptocurrency world.
Court documents later discovered by Motherboard indicate that a day after our last interaction, on April 9, Broeksmit was arrested and placed under a restraining order, barring him from near the loft. A “ghost gun” without a serial number is found in his car. He is released shortly afterwards. Four days later, on April 13, he re-enters the building. Then follows a long period of silence – until April 23, when someone texts me from Broeksmit’s Signal account. He isn’t. 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 lifeless body is found on the grounds of a secondary school, not far from where he had previously lived. An investigation into the cause of death is still ongoing, but initial police reports rule out malicious intent. The LAPD officer in charge of the investigation did not respond to an email request for comment. Marie Peter-Toltz, despite what the anonymous texter told me, is currently a missing person according to the California Department of Justice, and she has not responded to my texts, emails, and Twitter direct messages. Inevitably, Broeksmits has become dead fodder for a cottage industry of conspirators who strive to see in the death of a one-time whistleblower the work of an evil cabal.
But I feel like I knew the man behind the whistleblower person, who often enjoyed asking questions about mundane things like my dating life between sharing wild claims and tall tales. The news of his death shocks me. Broeksmit’s plan for crypto-alchemy backfired and sent him into a spiral that ended with the end of his life. I’m left with a story I promised to write and put it together through piles 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 this”, reads one of Broeksmit’s last texts. “Please, write to me honestly.”
