I agree there are different shades of scamming or untrustworthyness but the matter of the fact is he currently owes a lot of money which he took under false pretenses and abused his position regardless of excuses or explanations and until he pays it back it's all just talk. Sure, I hope he pays it back but that still wouldn't excuse what he's done and he still did initially take the money without keeping up his end of the deal so he still 'scammed' it from them so regardless of the outcome there's nothing wrong with calling this a scam. At best if he returns the money he's taken out an interest free loan for himself but that was never agreed upon and is still very untrustworthy though I would respect him for making the situation right.
You're absolutely right that there's nothing wrong with calling this a scam. And I don't disagree at all with that. It's actually this "he's a scammer, no excuses" remark which irked me. I think it may have to do with my own personal issues regarding quickseller. At some point he seems to have gotten into this idea that I am a scammer, and therefore I must be shunned and attacked at all times by all people for all eternity. I think this kind of binary mindset is just confusing and wrong and I see it a lot on here. As if the world is divided into angels and demons and the angels are always doing nothing but the most elevated and ethical and morally motivated things and the demons do nothing but try to subvert all that is right and good. To my mind, this kind of mindset clouds people's judgments and makes them unreasonable.
My point is that people are people and that people make mistakes. Some people make worse mistakes than others, some people try to rectify their past mistakes, others don't. But this doesn't add up to a black and white world where the only citizens are scammers and scambusters.
Here's an example of a direct cost to this mindset, Maidak said above that he watch his reptuation fall to -3000 overnight and found it very depressing and made it very hard to come back and face things here because he basically felt there was no hope to fixing his broken rep. Many of these "scambusters" in this scenario seem to me like some kind of vultures looking for dead bodies so that they can drop their negative feedbacks and say snotty thing in a thread like "I knew he would turn-scammer". The way they talk you'd think they were on star-wars looking at someone going to the dark-side.
Anyway, I basically agree with you and hope that Maidak is able to repay his debts. And for the record, I'd work for him again. He paid me on-time when I did a job for him and that's a valuable thing. I'm sorry to the people he scammed and I hope he makes it right and never does it again. I'm just quite irked by the broken mentality here generated by the trust-wranglers as they jockey to try to get more power on some popular internet forum.
