It seems like the altcoin world is scammier and scammier all the time so it helps to be cautious in the beginning.
I mined like 4 days of earthcoin when it first launched and got ripped off by a fake pool so I want to see auto pay work asap.
Hard to tell how much my eac would have been worth. I was out of town and left the miner running at 700kh so don't even know what I had.
You have lost about 0.15 BTC on EAC that day (those are current prices, 4 times more when it peaked). I lost coins because of that pool too, and am sure about the amount (this is a min. estimate). It was not a fake pool but Hackshard pool, operated by Devianttwo. It failed because of hardware issues. It failed during the early days of USDe too. I think they had similar issues with other coins, but cannot be sure about that since I didn't pay much attention after EAC failure.
edit: we lost EAC because we didn't set auto payout and when it failed coins were lost.