The last I heard from the SEC lawyer looking into the case is that they wanted to get a warrant on Trendon, but do not yet have enough information to get one, so we should figure out exactly what information they need to get a warrant and work with the bitcoin community to provide that information to them ASAP. BCB and I already talked and he'll probably be the go-between here between the community, myself, and the SEC.
Obviously the only people who can answer what information the SEC needs are the SEC themselves so that needs to be a top priority so that people aren't wasting energy on gathering information whicn will be useless to the SEC.
I would guess that a great deal will depend on the willingness of the PPT operators to co-operate with the SEC - they are the ones who hold the evidence of what was "invested" with pirate. Some of them did
not want to give details of who was owed what to pirate and they may not want to give that information to regulators either.
I agree that any kind of civil action by those who lost funds to pirate would be a dead end. Its pretty much only government regulators who have any chance of recovering anything from him.
There is no need to re-post the identifying information for pirate here. God knows it's already been posted 7,000 times before. It only needs to be communicated to the authorities -
if they don't already have it, which I very much doubt. The evidence that they likely need is evidence that he actually took funds from people. No amount of message-board posts prove that. They would need stuff like transaction IDs which can be followed to wallets thought to be controlled by pirate/GPUMax. No-one who chooses to remain anonymous to the investigators is ever going to see any restitution.
Find out what information it is that they need and then see if there's a way the community can provide it. As anything which is filtered through third parties is unlikely to be usable by the SEC, the chances are that people who hold information which constitutes actual evidence will need to contact the SEC directly and be willing to turn that evidence over to them (and possibly to testify in court if no deal can be cut with pirate by the regulators).
I think that proceeding with extreme caution is advisable here so that people's enthusiasm for amateur sleuthing doesn't inadvertently create some kind of legal technicality which would compromise the SEC's ability to take action against pirate.
It definitely sounds like it would be worth The Lending Partners talking to the guy from the SEC. There may well be other scams for which pirate could be prosecuted if there's currently insufficient evidence for them to move forward with the BTCST investigation.
As far as
conclusive evidence that pirate is actually Trendon Shavers rather than someone who merely hijacked the identity of Trendon Shavers goes, the photo Goat has posted of the LV meet-up confirms that and everyone who was present at that meet-up are potential evidence-givers in that respect. The person in that photo is the same person who showed up on the social networks of the Shavers family members as "Trendon Shavers" and the internet presences of those family members weren't recently created (the relationships are also supported by public documents like marriage certificates). A government agency can easily find the same evidence we did even though most of those social network pages are now hidden/deleted.
Given that the existence of an investigation into pirate's ponzi is already public knowledge, there is no reason whatsoever for the investigator not to make a direct appeal to the community for information to further the investigation.
