In March 2022, William Morton was in touch with an acquaintance he had made a few months earlier at E11even, a strip club and entertainment venue in downtown Miami that has hosted performances by rapper 50 cent and DJ Tiësto.
The person put Morton in contact with someone who had a proposition. Could the then 25-year-old hedge fund manager handle an investment and onwards overseas transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars?
Morton ran Camshaft Capital, a fund set up two years earlier that managed less than $10mn. He had no formal investment qualifications and at one point Camshaft’s official address was a pancake chain IHOP in Miami’s Little Havana neighbourhood. But if he had any reservations over the scale of the deal, lawyers would later claim, he set them aside. The eight-figure earnings were described in legal papers as “too good to be true”.