It can't be a group of people residing there that committed the crime because I know quite well that some of the countries are not supportive to register in the forum, because sometimes you will see people paid for evil fee before they could have access to make a post after registration, so it's not caused by group of people living in that geographical environment.
I don't think I have ever read or come across anything in this forum where anything concerning restricted countries was mentioned. If there were ever some countries restricted from registering here on the forum, even the evil pay won't grant them access to the forum.
Like what the admin said about Evil Pay, it's not far from what I mentioned above. Maybe the country, which you might think was banned from making registration here in this forum, was once totally free from doing that without being tagged evil, but due to the high rate of bans, users from the IP will contribute an effective proxy ban every user who registers from their will receive.
Take Nigeria, for example. I was told there was a time when people from here could also register an account freely without anything like being tagged to pay for evil, which the individual didn't literally commit, but as time goes on, things change, and even in those countries and areas where their IP addresses are clean, if there is a rapid growth in forum rule violations by those who use the forum over there, which leads to their account getting banned, there will also be a high possibility of new users getting the proxy ban too.