From the looks of it, vDice has in fact received approximately 137,700 ETH into what appears to be their address for receiving ETH for the ICO. Anyone should be able to verify this by looking up the balance of the ETH address 0x8bCCc9BA2E5706E24a36ddA02ca2A846E39a7bbF on any block explorer, I used
etherscan, which shows roughly the above amount of ETH received and no ETH sent. This does not mean however that all/most of this ETH did not originate from the devs of this site. The fact that what appears to be an etherum developer is also a dev of this site likely will make it difficult to make any kind of blockchain connection proving that the devs are the ones "investing" in the ICO. I personally would not be surprised if most of what has been invested so far is from people connected to the devs, considering just how bad of a deal this ICO is for investors.
I think the amount raised is probably legitimate. Here's my thought process:
If the devs had this sort of money themselves, they would've put it into their own site bankroll. But maybe not. There's perhaps a logical reason that they might not want to do that, (AFAICT) the bankroll itself has no protection from a malicious orclize or random.org. And on top their counter party risk, there's always the looming threat of bugs (that exist in all sites, not just vdice). So it's quite understandable to not risk too much bankrolling it.
So if they had that sort of money, but didn't want to put it in their bankroll, the logical thing to do be inflate the profits to make it more attractive for investors. However, if you look at the "total amount won" over the sites history, that's 877 ETH. That should correspond to roughly ~17 ETH profit for the site (they have a 1.9% house edge). Less than a couple hundred bucks.
So if the invested amount is shill-money, it would mean they're a) bad actors and b) have a lot of money. So they logically should've massively bumped up the sites profit, to make it look a lot more profitable than it is.
So my conclusion is that they're probably legitimate investors. I'm guessing there are some unsavvy investors who didn't bother to fact check the site claims and put a little too much money on it, hoping it'd be the next big thing.
I would be really surprised if more than 1% of the amount we see is from genuine investors. We know it's backed by someone with funds as they have the sig campaign, forum ads, twitter campaign, reddit upvotes etc...they also seem to know the ins and outs of the community pretty well despite nobody connected to the project having any real history or reputation older than a couple months. I think it's possible that this isn't the first time doing this for some or all of the people involved.
http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/11/15/vdice-ico-attracts-1-million-less-90-minutes/?platform=hootsuiteCurrent data: (50% bet has been broken for a few weeks now)