I don't know if there is an equivelent body in USA, b
Welcome to Scamerica!!!
You can joke all you want with this, but on second thought it is rather odd consumers in the biggest consumer market in the world are not protected more from such a things. I understand freedom of trade, free markets, weak state, and all this stuff, but believe me this is close to impossible to happen anywhere else. We scream constantly to overblown state mechanisms in my country, and state bureaucracy blown out of proportions, but I'm pretty certain anywhere else this things would end by state clerks all over the HF back. It's also odd that scam of these proportions is not all over the media, they should love such a juicy stories. How often multi-million dollar scams are there in the USA for this to go unnoticed?
It's the bitcoin aspect that screws up consumer protections. If it wasn't present, there would be more obvious recourse to that kind of complaint, and they'd stand a better chance of success.
But, if you put yourself in the shoes of a bureaucrat, you're kind of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" here. The "community" is loud and clear that bitcoin does not want regulation, but the "community" also has problems with dishonest and incompetent hardware manufacturers. From the federal level, there is bascially a policy vacuum, because the feds haven't figured out if and how to deal with it, and they are kind of signalling 'hands off', like the "community" says it wants.
So if you wade into this as a low or mid-level bureaucrat of the sort that might typically try to enforce consumer protection laws, you're probably going to get your head chopped off and be accused of overreaching. And you are probably saying to yourself, "heh, those guys, so proud of their independence and insulting the government all the time, now look who's crying? ... why should I stick my neck out for them? Most of them say I'm irrelevant, until they run into @ssholes like BFL and Hashfast. Well, sorry fellas, it's time you grew up and gave us more respect. Here's a lesson for you."