Let's begin.
#1. Was Crypto Rush opened with the intent of scamming people all along ?
Crypto Rush was opened by me with the intent to provide people with an exchange, and that's what it did. No scam intentions whatsoever. I wanted to make an exchange for CoinyeCoin back in Jan and approached this from a perspective of a hobby, so the startup was quick and sloppy. I actually gave up most of my real life activities to develop and work on the site. To say there was scam intentions from the start it makes me quite sad.
Also ask yourself this: why am I still here taking my time to answer your questions, and why was I staying around here all the time and in the IRC if this was just one big long con? And then ask yourself this, why is their a team, a huge team of people working really hard right now to get Crypto Rush back and operational. Why would they try and do that if they wanted to re-scam people or whatever when you and I both know all of these events are very damaging to the Crypto Rush brand. To put this much effort into something, they could have made 5 new exchanges and pulled the same thing over and over.
Not sure what else I can say to prove this wasn't a scam, in the long run people will believe whatever they want to believe.
#2. If not, was Crypto Rush hacked indeed as it was mentioned ?
Sadly yes, well no. It really depends how you look at it. On March 11th 600+ BTC was stolen and 2700 LTC (I can try to find the addresses if you want them). It happened about 11 AM GMT and I didn't discover it until 5 PM that day. The method used to do it was simple: they logged into the server via SFTP and created a PHP file that interfaced with my daemons and took the coins. Me and the team did a lot of tracking and tracing of the logs and everything points to an inside job, it's what I've felt the whole time. But there's no difference if this was a hack or if this was indeed an inside job as the fact remains: those coins were taken and they were gone. Nobody just gets the password for something and logs in without any brute force attempts and somehow knows the system and how it works and proceeds to exploit it so easily.
Originally thought (and still widely thought by the people who were told) that this was a result of the .git folder of the local git repo being publicly accessible from the public_html folder, with the user using those details to gain some sort of access to the passwords but theres still a large gap as to how that happened.
You can think of it what you will, it will plague me forever as to who or how it was done and whether it was or wasn't a hack.
#3. What was the real problem behind Zeitcoin (which i personally donated to Crypto Rush feeling bad after i read the initial post by the management)
The real problem with ZeitCoin is a combination of the code they released and the way I coded the site to rely on the daemons account feature (the same issue behind PoS coins). The system gets all its integrity from the daemon. If it makes a request to get a users balance and it says that user has 500 coins, then the system will let those 500 coins be used.
Zeitcoin did release a damaging update on their public git hub repo which contained code that would require a network wide fork. Unfortunately, me and the rest of the team are not trained to know what their code does, and we were instructed to upgrade our client by the public representative of the time (someone called Darren). So we did it and everything looked fine, except that every withdraw was failing. We didn't notice this for about a day, then shut it off again. Sometime soon after they released another update which should fix the problem introduced by the update before.
So we downloaded it and upgraded the daemon. That's when we spotted that all the transactions (internal and external) that took place were reverted from the last 24 hours. The site relies on internal balance move commands to execute trades, so if any one of them are undone users trades are lost and it results in either a user having coins they sold, or not having coins they bought. This is a massive problem, because the BTC/LTC side is untouched because the move commands were still intact for those people.
At this point there were 2 kinds of people: the people that were missing Zeit that they had purchased but not getting the BTC back, and the other who had all of the Zeit they sold over the 24 hours but still getting the BTC. We worked to manually process as many of those trades as possible and it took a very long time to do that. Along the way we discovered that pretty much every one of the latter group had withdrawn or further sold off their returned Zeit, leaving us with not enough coins to direct properly to people. For the people that withdrew the coins we refunded some users with BTC from our fee earnings to make them as happy as possible, but we couldn't afford to do that for everyone. Quite a stressful few days, so we decided the best course of action was the stop trading completely and just let everyone withdraw what they could and leave the coin open with an option to do so.
Eventually we ran out of Zeitcoins, tons of users still missing coins with the balances all unsynced. A complete nightmare. I don't like to point fingers but I've come to accept this was a 50/50 problem that would not affect other exchanges so badly if I programmed my own ledger system. The other 50 falls directly on Zeitcoin, as I had a conversation with them and they seemed to think its my responsibility to check their code works before they release it, something I (and hopefully everyone else) doesn't agree with. It's their responsibility to check the code before they push to their own repo before instructing someone to update. Hopefully people can understand why I blamed them completely at first.
#4. Has Blackcoin been indeed withdrawn by people in excess, as it was mentioned by mgmt ?
Yes, this was due to the PoS bug present in (from what I know) all PoS coins. As I mentioned above if the system says you have 500 coins, it will let you use them. In this situation we added BlackCoin on feb 27th or near that time with wallet version 1.0.1. We had no problems with it running and the balances reported correctly. After the forced fork that we didn't catch onto for a while due to a combination of work and sleep, we upgraded as quickly as possible to 1.0.5 the current version of the wallet. We check all coins before releasing them initially for the first time for this PoS bug, we don't do the same tests for upgrades of the wallet, and this time every user was very angry about the BlackCoin fork we were still on for a good number of hours. In my mind the most important thing was to upgrade that wallet and get on the correct fork.
So we did that and released, then soon after (about 45-60 mins) users reported to me and in the IRC they were having withdraw issues. I checked the global balance and we only had 53.xx coins, far less than we were supposed to. That was an obvious "oh shit" moment so I turned it off and did an audit. The results were that about 1.5 million coins were missing. Just so you know I did audits more than once a day for a long time to make sure nothing goes missing. So whether you believe me or not, there was no missing BC before this update or we would have known.
The problem I spotted right away was that the deamon reported the total of everyones balance should be equal to 22 million. That number was far inflated (and it was obvious, the balances were still showing as 22 min total while the wallet was pretty much empty). In this state when all the balances integrity was lost it was impossible to resume any trading so I went to rat4 the BC dev for help and potential compensation. He then stated in the conversation that he found the bug in his code, and pushed an update which fixed it for us. Well, it fixed the balances being displayed correctly now which got us to the number of 1.5 million lost.
Now that the balances were correct again it was easy to see all the users that withdrew too much, because their balance was now negative. We have a full list of users and transactions with txid's of the people that did this. It was the same exploit of the situation that happened with Zeit in some sense that people took what wasn't theirs because the system allowed it. There was a pump and dumper on twitter that posted a status that was something like "I just got 120k BC in my account on CryptoRush! Time to spend it on MintPal" or something like that. Other users in the IRC on various channels were mentioning they just got some random coins they didn't recognise. Whether anyone will back up my claims is another matter.
So yea, in answer to that question people did withdraw too much of what was not theirs.
#5. Is Crypto rush going to open with the intent of scamming others by claiming that we all have gotten paid back our losses ?
I read the IRC you posted, and I'm not sure why you quoted me in it but what fyrstikken says is a load of crap. If he still owned the exchange then he probably would have pulled some media stunt like that yea. Under my watch however I would never do that or even think to say users are paid back when they are not. The current team is working really hard, or as hard as they can, to rebuild and remake the whole site from scratch from my understanding. I'm pretty certain they are all working for free as well and they are doing it because they care about everyones losses and fully intend to repay everyone through what was mentioned in the debt management plan on the new main site.
So no, definitely not. There was never any scam intention from my part of the woods.
#6. Is Crypto Rush ever going to pay their customers back ?
I pretty much answered this one above, the plan details they will do it and I'm pretty sure they will be able to once trading resumes. Quite honestly whether they can or not is all down to the users who trade there again. The fees generated in revenue will go towards paying back users so the more people that trade the quicker everyone gets paid back. I suggest everyone to show their support by trading there again once it reopens, or it won't be possible to get those coins paid back to users.
#7. Do you think it is right, that we have been treated like scumb after we trusted Crypto Rush with our hard earned coins, and time spent trading mining and so on... as well as the fun made on IRC by mgmt and staff towards the investors (us) ?
I'm not sure how to answer this, because I'm not personally aware of anything like that happening. At least not while I was still in charge (which ended on the 26th March). Everything that happened after that point in terms of management and how the site was run was out of my hands, so I apologise on behalf of whoever conducted that behaviour. It would help if you mentioned more specific dates and events that makes you feel treated that way.
#8. What intentions does Fyrstikken have as far as Crytpo Rush is concerned, especially that many pools have decided to donate their stake in order to bring back the exchange ?
From my point of view, his stake involved his brand going all in on getting people to invest in CRS. In addition to that he was operating under false ownership, he thought he owned everything because I said he did at one point in a Skype chat. It's true he did own the site for about a week while he tried to find some people to run it, which he then apparently screwed over and lied to to convince them to take over under false pretences. In addition to that he then stole coins from CR on the day CRS was meant to be paid (he only returned less than 10% from my knowledge so far).
I got sick of his every move, he schemes behind peoples backs and says 1 thing but does another. Does he have connections that are trying to revive the site most probably. I told him to just drop every involvement since I did the best I could to also hand over to another group, and explained that after he took those coins the good will of the agreement I had with him was over but he didn't get it and kept going on like he owned the place. His followers also backed him up with that regard since they don't see him for the snake he is.
As for right now his intentions I have no idea, I stopped following him because his speeches were making me physically ill.
And last... Do you guys honestly think that, this is just going to wash away without any re-precautions and people will let it go ?
I don't think this one has an answer because as far as I'm aware its not relevant to the situation. It seems to me you are coming from a viewpoint of "I've been scammed". I'll say up front there was never an intention to scam anyone, not at the beginning not now. Nobody has actually been scammed either, everyone is just a victim of this hack and crazy downfall of Crypto Rush. From a users viewpoint the facts are still the same, you don't have your coins anymore. I think its much easier to show support instead of pointing fingers and shouting calling me a pedo and a thief. That's honestly quite hurtful whether you care or not about my feelings I'm gonna state it anyway. It should be obvious to everyone that these coins don't grow on trees and if you don't support the site, it will be very hard to ever get back your coins.
Hopefully these answers are satisfactory and if they are not, I'll do my best to clarify further any points you want.