Is Martin Shkreli’s $2 Million Wu-Tang Clan Album A Fake?

Notorious “Pharma Bro” and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli may have himself been defrauded — when he shelled out $2 million for the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s “secret” collector’s album last year, Bloomberg reports.

The one-of-a-kind, 21-track double-CD — titled “Once Upon A Time in Shaolin” — was made by “a little-known producer with a peripheral link to the storied rap group,” Bloomberg said after on-the-record interviews with a trio of artists and managers connected to the project.

The three say artists who rapped for the album — some as long as five years ago — never knew they were working for Wu-Tang at the time and never authorized it being used on the album.

They dismiss the producer who put it together, Tarik Azzougarh, aka “Cilvaringz,” as a newcomer to Wu-Tang.

Artists were told that their recordings would be “for a Cilvaringz album,” said one of the managers, James Ellis, who reps core Wu-Tanger Method Man.

“How it became a Wu-Tang album from there? We have no knowledge of that,” Ellis said.

The three men are also disgruntled over never having heard the album in its entirety and not knowing to what extent their work is on it — and whether they should be compensated with a chunk of Shkreli’s $2 million.

“It’s not an authorized Wu-Tang Clan album,” said Domingo Neris, who reps charter Wu-Tang rapper U-God.

“We’re very detailed about the quality and how we put our best foot forward,” Neris said.

“We would never have authorized anyone to put together a project and call it a Wu-Tang Clan record without us ever looking at it, hearing it, or being in the same room together,” Neris said.

“That’s just the way these guys work.”

Bloomberg reached out to Shkreli for comment on whether he thought he’d been conned into buying a less-than-genuine Wu-Tang album.

He emailed in response, “hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

“Bloomberg is an overpriced, legacy software system that subsidizes a money-losing media company,” added Shkreli, who since that response has been ordered held in federal lockup pending his January sentencing date.

It’s unclear what impact his status as a guest of Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center will have on his own ongoing auction of the album on ebay. Posted for auction two weeks ago, bidding had topped out this week at $1,006,600.

Speculation over the legitimacy of the album has swirled among Wu-Tang fans since founding member RZA announced in 2014 that it would be filled with never-before-heard verses from original members — and that only a single copy would be auctioned at a starting price of $1 million.

Fans were angry that they couldn’t hear the music themselves — and then became incensed when it was purchased by Shkreli, the former drug company exec who’s widely derided for hiking the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 percent.

But in an opinion piece published Friday on Forbes.com, staffer Zack O’Malley Greenburg points out that everyone — Shkreli included — knew all along that the album’s producer, Cilvaringz, was not a founding Wu-Tang member.

The album is genuinely the work of Wu-Tang founding members, regardless of what they are saying now about the recording and producing process, he argues.

“As one of the few people who’s heard several minutes of it, I can say with certainty that it sounds like a Wu-Tang album, bringing all the vivid urgency of 1990s New York into your eardrums,” he writes.

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