In no case do I think the scam was premeditated or that anyone other than FC was involved.
I know there can not be any proof for this claim, but would you disclose any logic behind this? What makes you so confident to state above?
I dont often agree with jimmothy, but I do here. Its a weird kind of scammer that first returns 6x more to its investors than it ever collected in its IPO. if it was premeditated, it certainly wasnt a few years ago. And its an unbelievably incompetent scam when you pull the plug right at the moment where everyone is holding their wallets expecting the launch of a new product, that could greatly increase his loot, just by selling (fake) BE300 bulk preorders or hashrate based on it.
Everything points to there being more to this story than FC pulling off a very weird and/or very incompetent scam. I still think its far more likely the discovery by authorities of 'theft' / misappropriated electricity of their mine is what triggered this collapse. Conjuncture, for sure, but more plausible than the incompetent scam theory.
There were posts that had mentioned that either ASICMINER or AMHASH was having difficulty selling all of their mining power that AMHASH1 was supposed to be backed by. So it is possible that he decided that it would not be financially viable to continue running his company so he just stole everything that he could from his customers.
This goes to show why it is not good to ever own miners that you do not physically control as it will always be trivial for whoever physically controls your miners to steal them and to steal whatever mining revenue that your miners should generate