I think Gavin was just lazy in how he validated this (he probably was misdirected by a conman Wright into focusing on validating the signature, not on assessing

I think Gavin was just lazy in how he validated this (he probably was misdirected by a conman Wright into focusing on validating the signature, not on assessing whether the signature and key actually meant anything....turns out it was a non fresh message, so it wasn't proof that the human in front of him actually controlled the key.) Neither Jon Matonis nor Ian Grigg have said they actually did real validations themselves, just that they talked with the guy. If he is a conman (which is what seems to be the case) I wouldn't fault them too much for falling for him.