With deep regret I have to confirm the OP's scam accusation claims. One of the previously most competent and respected member of this community collected a lot of money from me and other investors, burnt it, and finally ceased communication and disappeared.
DeathAndTaxes: a legendary member and former mainstay of our communityI took notice of DaT late 2011 after I started building my first GPU based rigs and stumbled upon some of his posts in this forum. What stroke me immediately was the quality and completeness of his technical analyses and explanations and the solidity of his argumentation. Over the years while mining technology evolved over FPGA to ASIC, people were losing coins to online wallets over ponzis to exchanges and securities, and while bitcoin itself evolved, it was hard to find any relevant discussion where DaT did not contribute with valuable input.
While I focused myself on the technical side of mining and over time found it very difficult to keep up-to-date even with this narrow sub-topic, DaT always seemed capable of following any development in the bitcoin world. Take a look at his
essay supporting block-size increase as an example of his contribution. If you check the
forum stats, you will notice that DaT contributed over 16k posts and with that is the 8th most active poster of all times - even half a year after he stopped posting.
For me, Gerald was one of the (if not the) most competent fellow(s) and with that a mainstay for this community - and for sure I know that I have not been the only one with that impression. Ironically, if you search the 'scam accusation' sub-forum, you'll find him involved as mediator or in other trust-centric functions.
But that was then, and the expensive lesson I and the other investors had to learn is that a brilliant and sane mind does not imply it is also a honest one.
The BitSimple fiascoSomewhere in early January 2014 (during a chat about immersion cooled high-density ASICs) DaT incidentally told me that he was collecting money for a seed funding of his BitSimple exchange service. I did not even thought about it twice but agreed to buy what is left and ended with 390k from a total of 1200k series A shares. With the total sum of $600k collected, my payment was a $195k equivalent in BTC. Iirc, all of the handful investors paid in BTC, which made this seed funding the first processed completely in the BTC domain. Shares were managed by the
gust platform.
I was very well aware of the involved risk, but at the same time I felt it is not worse than putting my coins into pre-orders of mining equipment or into doubious bitcoin companies. After being defrauded and betrayed by so many, my hope was straight and simple:
if there is one person to remain honest, it must be DaT - if he did not, it was time to leave this community.What happened thereafter is what OP is reporting. I was very disappointed to realize that Gerald managed to spend the collected funds mostly to pay his employed family-members - even if most of the time the exchange was not operational due to a missing bank account. Even if this might be legal, it is very unethical and puts him and his intentions in a very suspicious light. Still, I was willing to accept this as business failure when the company is dissolved and remaining assets were distributed to investors (which would give us back some 15%). But shortly after the investors agreed to do so, DaT stopped communicating and is not reachable any more for the past 6 months.
This is a sad ending for a bright shining star.
You too, Gerald? 
