Cause Craig is smart. Like me.
Okay. I don't believe any of this for one second, but just for everybody else reading this thread, the Australian Tax Office wasn't after Craig for his bitcoin holdings. They were after Craig because he made false statements in tax filings for (at least one of) his companies.
Andrew Sommer was a lawyer who represented Craig for his ATO dealings and ultimately quit after he had been informed that Craig apparently forged a number of emails sent to the ATO to support his case. Coin-Exch Pty Ltd is one of Craig's dozen or so failed companies.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536.1.15.pdf
Here you can clearly see his company owes $5.68 million AUD to the ATO. In the explanation letter accompanying the audit results:
Again in 2015, another one of Craig's companies, DeMorgan, tried to claim $54 million AUD in tax rebates that were based on false premises:
The interesting thing is that all three entities are involved in financial services/fintech – DeMorgan is involved in cryptocurrency.
Of course they never paid him a penny. But that didn't stop Craig from using the supposed rebates to entice investors into a DeMorgan subsidiary named Cloudcroft, which was liquidated by the ATO in 2017:
The company claimed to be assisting high-end computing firm SGI in building supercomputers. SGI quickly denied that claim.
Basically, Craig has a well-established history of being an unrepentant liar about everything. And that trait seems to accurately characterize his supporters as well.