Let's all just throw out blatant accusations and hang everybody before getting all of the facts.
You are right ScottAllyn, before jumping into conclusion we need to get the facts. The facts are
- A user called Herman was looking for a VRC seller in the IRC channel saying that he is not familiar with altcoin, but he would trust the sellers in the official IRC channel and he has 132 BTC
- There were many users sitting in the IRC room and witnessed this, including one of my friend who has 100k VRC and logged in not long before that event to see if there are any news about DEV4
- Someone, a regular IRC user offered to sell his VRC for the price of 0.00033, 4 times higher than the price at the time saying for this inexperienced buyer that because the quantity is big, this is a fair price
- At that moment no one raised any issue with the deal and EffectsToCause and the German Verileader Reavon jumped in by saying that they will escrow a deal
- At that point a user started to complain that don't rip-off that inexperienced buyer and how on the earth is possible that the lead VeriCoin developer is orchestrating such rip-off
- Another IRC visitor user had complained as well saying that yes, that's not right
- EffectsToCause kicked-off the users who complained from the IRC channel
- 2 hours later a regular IRC user in this thread offered me a deal, saying that there is a buyer with 132 BTC and asked if I am interested in selling my coin for this user
According to the IRC trans-script these are the facts what users/investors who were sitting in the IRC room could see.
EffectsToCause who is man of high moral standards, doesn't like FUD and kicked-off users from the IRC channel who complained about his role in the ripp-off deal never ever said to Herman, that please go away, you can buy coin for 0.00008, you don't need to pay 0.00033 here. Instead of EffectsToCause - according to his essays is on a mission to serve human kind with decentralized digital currencies - was orchestrating a deal with a Verileader, Reavon to create an escrow and take the 132 BTC from Herman - to sell vericoin for 4 times the market price.
IRC users, existing and potential investors who visited the IRC room had no reason to assume that it is a joke as you said - all they could see that Doug Pike lead Vericoin developer was part of rip-off deal.
First the shady association with Wizrig. Then the price pumping tweets from the devs, appearance in the exchanges troll-box, sending 200k VRC exchanges to dump it and now this escrow deal.
I don't think that's what investors expected when they read the PhD students and the MS developer CVs.