Topic: Pirate accomplices - page 12. (Read 30339 times)

We have thread after thread around here in which people point out that they're not children and they don't need to be warned about risk and the possibility of losing their money.  And yet here we have a thread in which people want to blame others for the risks they not only chose to take but were almost beating down doors to be allowed to take.

Most start ups will fail.  Most HYIPs will collapse.  These things are a given which people wilfully ignore time and time again in their rush to be in on the ground floor of high risk financial services.

Whether pirate's scheme was a scam or just a spectacular (and likely inevitable) business failure is yet to be determined, but nobody should being doing less due diligence when using pass-throughs than they would if they were making a direct investment.  Those running pass-throughs aren't your financial advisors or portfolio managers.

There should obviously be a serious attempt to find out whether pirate has taken the money and run, spent it on hookers and blow, or simply lost it in what was emphatically known to be an extremely high risk venture.  The appropriate course of action should be determined by the findings of such investigation, not solely by the fact that people lost money (a risk they happily undertook of their own free will).

For once, the amount involved is probably large enough to warrant investigation by conventional financial/computer crimes authorities rather than simply being regarded as a civil matter.  Of course, any such investigation may well reveal that pirate was using everyone's Bitcoins for explicitly illegal purposes and that the interest payments people received were the proceeds of crime.

To those seeking vigilante justice - how likely do you consider it is that you can exact retribution against pirate without any acts of vengeance against him being investigated?  Is this really something you're willing to risk prison time (or worse) over?

I've actually reported several over the last few days and the forum mods seem to be cleaning them up pretty quick. 

No you don't because that is complete and pure hyperbole.  Not a single person has calimed they will engage in vigilantism and even if they did that would be what 1 (or a handful) out of tens of thousands.  Hardly "associated almost exclusively".

The fact that you can't see past that means you don't want to see past that.  You have no use for Bitcoin.  You have no use for this forum.  You have no use for your account other than to troll until the trolling gets boring and then you will disappear.

BTW you don't speak for 100,000 people.  You don't speak for anyone except your small insignificant self. 

I tend to agree (and wonder if any big lender already started to lawyer up), BUT we are not speaking about a smart con of real investors Madoff style. Here the scam was mathematically warranted and obvious to anyone with a brain; in fact most if not all "invested" betting to take home enough interests and maybe the capital too before the castle of cards collapsed. That's at least what I knew and did, and in a some months I took home enough interest to compensate all or almost of my capital now gone with a PPT.
This obviously does not absolve in any way the pro-pirate party, on the contrary it aggravate much their position.

Now, I would add that a further proof of the criminal scam is that nobody received a bitcent back (apart from a few fishy second-hand rumors of a few hundreds coins). If Pirate was honest in his intention to pay back, he could have liquidated whatever he was doing and give back what he could like in any business gone wrong. The fact that he instead keeps bulshitting around occasionally and paying nothing from 10 days speaks for itself.

This might be what you're looking for.

There is a world of difference difference between fooling and being fooled, scamming or being scammed. If you genuinely believed it to be true, and it turns out it isnt,  even if you spread the  word, you were still  scammed,  not scamming. You didnt profit from it, you lost.


Pirate co owns gpumax, but he isnt the only one. Besides, the risk is minimal, one or two days worth of mining.  But if gpumax paid out once a week or month, I doubt there would be many miners there right now.


Seems to me zux0r is the one doing all the work there.


I can only speak for myself, but the accusations I make are under the stated assumption this turns out to be a scam, which seems highly likely  now, but Im willing to give it another week or so before I drop any such qualifications .
(There are some exceptions, regardless of the outcome of this saga, goats constant contradictions and flatout lies should stick to him regardless of what happens next. If by some miracle pirate pays out, Im sure Goat will tout he was always right and said so all along, and we should all bow and apologize, not to mention, we should forget he just claimed the opposite, and has been claiming the opposite of that opposite before. Whatever makes him more money.)

+1  - Reputation is worth more in the long-run.

Plenty of fraudsters have public lives and stick around too long. That is not evidence for or against legitimate conduct. Neither do pseudo-anonymous allusions to vigilantism magically negate the responsibility those, who claimed to know what business pirate was engaged in while defending his investment vehicle, have to come forward with that information.

Interesting post.


This post has disapeared somehow.

If I understand  it correctly Burt Wagner was quoted as saying:


That would be nice to have that Burt's post "undeleted" and posted here.

Why, because they were complicit in bringing in massive amounts of new "investment" to an incredibly shady lender running a ponzi scheme, all the while trying to shut down any questioning of the scheme and conspiring to maintain opaque accounts etc? Well fucking waaa. I feel so sorry for them. 

No! No no no. They went and gambled and had some fun. I think they really believed in his business. They're victims, not thieves.

This isn't a productive path to go down anyway.

For starters. You knew enough to meet him in Vegas along with all the others who are now a part of this too. All of you are a part of this theft.

I see what you are saying. If I were Pirate, I too would be scared for my life. I guess the line between discussing the grave reality of revenge vs. actually condoning it is a blurry one for me.

Patrick also said the he figured it out.

Thanks for your constructive thoughts little sockpuppet. I'm so glad that you have determined what is good and not so good for bitcoin. Scam = good, talking about what happens to scammers = bad in your world. Okay, glad you cleared that up. Go back to your corner and resume drooling, the grown ups really don't need your input on this one. We'll let you know if there is a call for the simpleton vote, and you will be the guy.

HonestBob- if you are willing to put honest in your name, I know we don't have to worry about you, but is it really a "vigilante sentiment" when folks start talking about the consequences of stealing over $5,000,000? To me it is more cause and effect. Nothing sentimental about it. You offer a service and make good on that service, you deserve your reward, enjoy your profit and pass Go, collect $200 and have a great life. You create a multi-dimensional scam, recruit a willing army of dupes to pimp it for you, fleece five million dollars worth of value from the "investors" who contributed to your magical money making machine, and then think because you can curse at a couple of folks you get to walk away free and clear with your gains? Nope. And still not sentimental, you deserve that reward too, it just won't be as pleasant as the first. You created the scenario, you live with the results, irrespective of how horrific they may be. Lay down with dogs, expect fleas. Lay down with an anonymous money laundering operation that is generating profits at a South Sea Bubble rate and then think you can just walk away with everything? Expect consequences. Big scary, bad men with bad intention consequences.

Don't play if you don't like results when you don't win. Big boy games that can make 7% gains in a day, every single day do not attract big boys that are forgiving when the balloon pops.

I just want to say here that notme deserves a lot of credit for how he handled his passthrough (he paid back his subaccounts out of his own pocket). Kudos to him, man. That's not the kind of integrity you see everyday, much less on the internet.

HB

Hmm.. Im not sure I  agree.
Their main responsibility would be sticking to the letter of their contracts. Particularly someone like  PayBTC who has to his credit   been fairly upfront about the pirate risk, never said he understood or even trusted the business model, but there was demand for passthroughs bonds and he delivered and fulfilled his end of the bargain.

That might even be true for goat's bonds, but the big difference here is Goat claimed to know what pirate did, and said over and over again it was not a ponzi. Now it appears he did indeed know what pirate did and it was a ponzi.  Perhaps that could or should make him liable for losses incurred, IANAL, but even if not, it sure makes him a hypocrite lying sack of shit.

Please don't misuse the term.   Adam Smith defined free markets as markets free from corruption, fraud, coercion, and governmental interference.  A ponzi scheme is not a free market.  Not unless you accept that the victims have a right to extract $5M in compensation from the operator.  Having the perpetrators hide behind the defense of the law (governmental interference) while claiming "free market, free market" is the height of hypocrisy.

The free market would involve the creditors using any means necessary to secure recovery of their funds including seizing all Pirates assets, his livelihood, his businesses, his future earnings/pensions/inheritances, and holding as collateral anything he holds dear.  The same would be done for those who helped to perpetuate this fraud.

Thankfully for Pirate and others there is no free market but please please don't pretend a free market is only a one way street.  A market which allows a criminal to engage in fraud but then protect him from consequences of that fraud is not free, not even close.