I think they had a trading loss at some point before the December 45% off sale. They're profit margin was very tight, so a loss of 22% would have basically made them have to work for free or at a loss. They had the sale to raise money to trade their way out of the loss. When the sales went so well, they likely decided that a bigger "New Year Mines" sale would put them over the top and give them the funds to easily trade back all of the losses.
They may have been on the wrong side of the market again when BTC began to dump on 1/11. That is when payments stopped getting executed. They may have lost more than 22% due to the possible 2nd loss. At that point they had to divert all available fund to their trading account. They could not spare any funds for customer withdrawals. They knew that they could not afford for customers to continue accruing BTC while they were trying to rebuild what was lost. They came up with the "government froze our accounts/servers" story. When people started to question, it made them nervous. They chose to post the liberty reserve site seizure image to try to back up the story of the government shut down. When EcuaMobi figured out that it was a ruse and posted the info, they shut everything down including the forum thread.
They may come back or may not. I have a strong feeling that they will come back. Part of why I think that is because of their 1.5 year history and the fact that Sector continued to post updates to us in the thread. If it was a complete scam, why not just disappear? Why try to save his reputation? He is basically anonymous, so why tell the elaborate story about the servers, hosting, and government seizure to buy time? I think they lied to us about what happened, but they are trying to fix the problems. We'll have to wait and see what happens...
I like what you've put together here. It's positive, and gives some hope. Perhaps you are right, perhaps they just needed some breathing room, so they faked a shut down in order to stop investment earnings until they sorted their funding. I hope you are right. I would forgive them this, even if they lied. As long as they started back up again some time in the near future and continued as they left off. After all, we all need a time out once in a while when things get on top of us, so I would gladly grant them this in order to recover. Fingers-crossed! And well thought out on your part!