Bah, I'm busy with moving on with my life right now. But I should give up the info:
Basically I had a long chat with his last employer, who is a great guy but flat out told me that Trendon is a total con man. He stole money from the company (The Lending Partners) in a wide variety of ways. He headed up IT there and routed orders through his "personal" account, which was just a trick for him to skim off the top of all the orders. Eventually he started charging pirated software, and then ultimately just made up reams of fake orders to steal directly from the company. He ended up stealing tens of thousands before they figured it all out. Unfortunately, before they figured it out, he had also borrowed about 13K from the company's owner (apparently he was very convincing, and sometimes did bizarre "random acts of kindness" and was "charming" when necessary), and when he finally threatened Trendon with legal action Trendon just told him that he was planning on declaring bankruptcy and that he had no assets - so they dropped the case.
The guy is a compulsive liar with a massive fantasy-based ego as well. Before they fired him, they noticed he would say all kinds of bullshit like that he went to MIT for a year (fake), he was a pool hustler (he could barely play), an amazing blackjack player (barely knew anything), as basketball superstar (could barely play) etc, etc. It got to the point where he lied so much that everyone in the office thought it was almost funny: they'd say "what'd Trendon make up this week?"
He even asked the owner for 2 million at one point, telling him he could turn it into 3 million in ~one week~ - but he wouldn't tell him any details, including who it would go to or anything! When I told him about btcst and what is going on, he said not only was he not surprised, but he said along the lines of "this was where it had to go because he just can't help himself, he has to feed his ego. He's a con man, it's who he is." He called the delays/excuses "classic Trendon" and said he pulled the exact same shit when he was asked to repay the company.
I suppose a die-hard would say my conversation is not 100% proof that btcst was a scam, but after hearing this character reference from a trustworthy source, combined with everything else that has happened, I'd say the chances of him repaying are about as likely as me jumping 10 stories high (hey, Trendon can do it! really!)
Too bad they didn't get him the first time. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain and loss.
This is priceless. Nice job.
BrightAnarchist: You had said something previously about knowing 'with near certainty' that pirateat40 has 10% of the coins left. Any info on that?
I was just following the coins from the deposit addresses. They move in a very bizarre manner, not like normal transactions, but more like deliberate laundering. Basically, one address moves coins sequentially from one address to another (very rapidly, looks scripted), and after each hop a very tiny amount of coins is split off into another address. After hundreds of hops it finally gets to the point where the coins reach 0 and a "leaf" is found. Then all of the tiny addresses recombine later into large accounts.
Here are some of the stashes, you can follow your nose from input addresses to reach these points:
This one has 40K BTC in it:
https://blockchain.info/address/1BqcwhKevdBKeos72b8E32Swjrp4iDVnjPAnother big one with about 7K BTC, coins are still moving (it's ALIVE!):
https://blockchain.info/address/1NuTLFADAHJZqUQ9ogAqroCzDhsGjV5vyEAgain, inputs from BTCST can be directly traced here, and the path definitely does not look like a series of "natural" transactions, but definitely deliberate laundering. Walk the chain yourself, it's boring but you'll see what I mean pretty quick.
I guess we can't be 100% certain though I suppose, so I apologize if saying that was too hasty, but honestly what's the point of a scam if there's no profit? He's got something (although certainly not 500K lol). It's just common sense.
How are you tracking/tracing things ?
I, myself, can only stare at the blockchain.info site for so long till I go cross-eyed....lol
Good Info none the less.