Topic: The curious case of user 🏰 TradeFortress 🏰 (Read 1342 times)

Not everyone.  Still waiting for TF to repay my 6 BTC from 2013. Not forgotten, not forgiven.

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/183c1ab1b36608b27d86e08cfe4ec9110b2c2168947c75934edc99a631b3b41b

He didn't delete it, Mods did:
That's probably because it's off-topic.

Thank you both! Much appreciated

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My dear Bluto,

First of all, I am curious why you made that post, only to delete it afterwards...  

About Roger, I think there is enough evidence mentioned as feedback on his Trust page, where multiple users exposed his scheme:



Don't you think he is red enough? Furthermore, he also has a flag open on his name, for defrauding people. The topic mentioned as reference is this one: Roger Ver/Memorydealers is intentionally defrauding people.

But what's the connection, from your pespective, between "Bitcoin Jesus" and 🏰 TradeFortress 🏰?

I started this topic to point out that 🏰 TradeFortress 🏰 acts like nothing happened in the past and is still present on the forum, instead of having, at least, the decency to make himself gone from here. But Roger Ver is not present on the forum anymore. So what's the connection?

About what you said about Erik Vorhees I don't know what to say, I did not study this subject.

And, once again: why did you delete your post?

More specifically: https://loyce.club/archive/posts/6135/61354460.html

See https://loyce.club/archive/topics/537/5377727.html

I noticed, a few days ago, that someone made a post in this topic. I noticed it as the topic was highlighted when selecting "Show new replies to your posts". However, I did not see who made the post and I also did not read the post at the respective moment. A few days later I remember about it and I come to check the topic, but it seems that whoever made the post, deleted it, as now the last post of the topic (excepting this one) is from July 24th.

Is there any way to see the deleted post? Maybe LoyceV can help somehow...? I am curious what the post was about (also why it was deleted).

Lol you just seem to have forgotten that it wasn't you who said that sentence, but it was LoyceV. If you haven't, of course I am referring to the person who wrote that sentence not to the one quoting it. Funny somehow you're taking credit for it.

Thank you for the high consideration you have about me, but I am not involved in managing the Trust system. I am only assigned to cycle merits inside my gang. Fore more information, please see also my Personal Text.


Yes, I actually believe that. And it seems I am not the only one:



Oh, how sweet of you! You haven't cursed those coins? Are we safe then?


Oh, this is so kind, now I can rest in peace. I was really worried that I am a shit-poster but now I feel so relieved...


True, there is nothing to gain here. Furthermore, from what I saw, you mostly lose something, rather than gaining. Therefore, why the effort to be here?


Aww, come on... Be here for fun and stories and risk losing so many other things...? Better be safe than sorry!

Does anyone know definitively why TF stopped to refund the people he scammed?

Amen, said the GodFather of the very much "trusted" system.



nah come on, do you think I have nothing else to do then follow those who opposed my flag and contradict them? Anyway I've done none of that to the other people who opposed my flag. You just happened to open up a very interesting subject (I'll give you that, at least you're not shitposting), and that's why I followed up. I just found the subject interesting. I don't really have to participate in any activity on the forum, I have nothing to gain here, except some interesting exchanges with some people, some fun, and reading some interesting stories.

Thank you both, NeuroticFish and PrimeNumber7, for your comments and involvement here.

And, speaking of semantics, thank you also for explaining to PaperWallet the difference between possible and probable. But, have no fear, he knows this difference, but he's just acting dumb. And he's acting dumb for a very specific reason, which I'll explain below. I hoped, up to this point, that he will stop being childish, but seeing that his tantrum continues, let's see what it's based of.

As you probably guessed yourselves, it has nothing to do with TF case It's just that PaperWallet is biased against me for a specific reason.

A while ago, he created a flag against FortuneJack, a flag which was, in my opinion (and not just mine), inappropriate, therefore I opposed it.

Excepting that, from his own will, PaperWallet stated that he is willing to give a small prize to all users which would either support or oppose his flag. That was his own will, without being coerced by anyone else.

Afterwards, seeing that users are opposing his flag, he started to be delusional, stating ridiculous things, such as he will curse the prizes he was going to award (facepalm moment), in a sore attempt to make users to ask him to not send that prize anymore lol.




Of course, to such allegation, replies like this one seem best approach:

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TL;DR: PaperWallet is a sore loser which has nothing to do with TF, nor he gives a damn about what TF did in the past All he cares about is that I opposed his flag and now, no matter what I would have said, he would have to say the opposite.

This topic could have been about other notorious scammers or other repugnant individuals, such as El Cabron, master-P, Butterfly Labs, pirateat40, cablepair, humanrightsfoundation etc. etc. etc. No matter the subject, PaperWallet's reaction would have been the same.

I hope that things are more clear now about his views

Anyone can be a scammer, but that does not mean that everyone should be treated like a scammer if there is no evidence they are a scammer.

Sure, it is possible that GazetaBitcoin is an alt of some scammer, but I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that is the case. Nor am I aware of any accusations of GazetaBitcoin scamming anyone, credible or otherwise.

I would compare this to TF, whose case has a set of facts that I do not believe are disputed (and that I understand are accepted by TF), which makes me believe that TF has not honored his obligations to certain members of the community. You can argue semantics as to what he should be called, but I think it is reasonable to not entrust him with your money.

While in theory everything is possible, in reality a scammer simply doesn't have the patience to build for so long for a pretty much uncertain result.
Scammers want easy money/easy results. So this behavior would not match with scammer's psychology.
Just my 2 satoshi.

Of course, you may be, that is totally possible, no need for a bright mind, even you must say it's possible.

"we" is the average user who comes and reads some of the scam accusations and the reputation section in this forum. There are a lot of them, the latest one is the BitLucy scam perpetrated by "trusted" member Royse777.

We perfectly agree, so obvious that it's only a matter of chance to fall for a scam here, the "trust" system does not help that much. Scams are as frequent as weather changes.

Here, again, we agree. I just said there is nothing to brag about not that you are bragging.

Everybody has the right to trust or distrust anybody else. I have no problem with that. However, the reason stated by you (below) for distrusting me is pure idiocy.


So you are implying that I may be an old scammer of the forum, which was blamed in the past and then, somehow, returned with a new account and spent years for building a good reputation, just to have the chance to meet such a bright mind as you are to expose me. Do I understand this correctly?


What are these scams "we see" (who is "we", anyway?) with the "trusted" members (and who are these "trusted" members?)? Can you be more specific, please?


What you wrote above is outstanding wisdom. It's like saying that, when you go out of your house, you have 50% chances of having a rock falling on you. Your unbelievable words of wisdom remind me of an old story about a tribe of Gypsies, which elected an old Gypsy to rule them. And, in each morning, when the elder was going out of his tent, he was saying: "today may rain or may not rain". And everyday he was right! And all the Gypsies were stunned by his intelligence!



Sadly, Trust score does not always reflect someone's trustworthiness, as many members are misusing Trust feedbacks. However, excepting that, you say that I am bragging about my Trust score. Where have I (ever) done that?

Of course, what I am saying, you are not to be trusted no matter what. The idea that those old scams were gone does not mean that the scammers did, and they could have very well created new accounts such as yours (who knows) and now they say oh look at those old scams they should be all gone. And the proof is all of the scams we see with the "trusted" members.

Now definitely like everywhere else there is still some people who never scammed but most of the time it's a matter of chance to fall on someone who does/does not scam. It might be your case (for now), but there is nothing to brag about your trust score because it has very little meaning.

The point I was trying to make was that TF clearly had a lot of coin after the hack (or more likely IMO, "hack"), and this runs contrary to TF's claim that he is/was so broke that he was trying to get minuscule amounts of coin from signature campaigns.

Money, including bitcoin is fungible. If TF had personal funds, but also ran a business that took on debts (such as customer deposits), in most cases, if the business had losses, his personal funds would need to be used to cover any business debts.

It's hard to believe it's almost been 10 years... let me try to clear things up from my memory.

TF had a ton of BTC in his wallet AFTER the hack. He did not deny this and claimed that this was his personal funds and nothing to do with inputs.io user deposits. I don't remember how much, I can probably find out if I look hard enough, but I believe it was at least $100,000, if not over $1,000,000. I believe what happened is with the cryptoboom he made millions from altcoin trading this money and this is the money he used to repay everyone. I believe that the only reason he did that was because his IRL identity is somewhat known to people and now that he was a multi-millionaire the best move was to repay people to avoid any potential legal issues.

I also think the hack was made up. He blamed the hosting provider linode for the hack. For people who don't know, there was a few hacks that happened back in 2011-2012 with sites that were hosting on linode that had 2fa bypassed, there was actually a guy called Zhou Tong who owned a site (forget name of site) this happened with, and there were a lot of similarity between TF and him including age location etc. They are not the same person but I reckon that had something to do with TF choosing this cover story. But anyway my point is linode was literally hated by the community and everyone knew not to use them because bitcoins kept getting stolen from sites hosted there. At the time everyone who heard that he was using linode thought he had to be faking, it was just too convenient that he was claiming to be another linode victim. Nobody could have been that stupid to put anything BTC related on linode. He also never preserved any of the logs or any evidence of the hack from back then. Also all of "his" money he had after the hack was heavily washed through bitcoin mixers so could easily have been the same coins.

I believe the hack was made up because his business model was not sustainable and he was losing money for months before this as well as gambling away tons of money and even getting scammed himself, and this was his way out of the situation. He had 3 businesses, coinchat, a website that paid people for chatting, inputs.io a wallet that had no fees for offchain payments, and coinlenders, a lending site. In that time period, peole who got into lending lost big time, he even mentions that in this thread, all those p2p lending platforms ended badly. So it's not exactly clear how he was turning any profit, but he was was regularly throwing around cash, making 100btc+ bets on gambling websites such as justdice etc.

So thats basically my opinion on how things went. He was a very young lonely dude, talented for his age but wayyy too cocky, he launched 3 websites. They got a lot of users, he made a lot of friends and enjoyed the online reputation he had. But the businesses never made any profit. So once his websites bled too much money, he faked the hack and ran away with the rest of the funds, got into altcoin trading and made bank, then decided his best move was to pay back the people he scammed.

I'll also add something I just remembered. TF had a pretty bad gambling problem, I hope he's doing better now. But even before he did anything bitcoin related, he was literally in the news because he had spent something like $50,000 on microtransactions for an online game. No idea how he was able to get that much money because he was a teenager. I remember the games developer literally stalked him after he tried to quit to try and get him addicted to the game again. Something relevant to think about.

Anyway, I'm glad the guy paid most people back, he did the right thing, sounds like he eventually sorted out his life. I didn't have much knowledge of mental issues back then but I definitely do now as I've lost people close to me, and I myself am living with depression etc, so I'm actually relieved to see him posting here and hope the best for the guy.

Theres way more stuff I could talk about, it's slowly coming back to me, at one point years ago I was literally considering writing a book about the whole thing because there is wayyy more to the story lol. But I kinda feel like it wouldn't be anyones benefit to bring up half of the shit, probably best if we stop beating the horse. Just felt the need to correct the record a little bit.

Good observation, PrimeNumber7! Perhaps he needed more those coins for impressing Internet chicks than paying back his victims. After all, our main role, here, on Earth, is to perpetuate our specie. Perhaps, TF is very interested in reaching humanity's main goal (which should be a noble act (/s) ) and, for that, he used the coins in impressing such women hoping that he would also be able to perpetuate humanity. The other  people's loss was, probably, less important for him.

After all, what could matter more? Having an offspring or paying back a debt? Let's be reasonable here.

(P.S.: I hope you noticed the "/s" I wrote above.)

In TF's above post, you will see that he seems to have admitted to having at least 1000BTC of his own money as of 2016. This is not the same as him admitting to stealing money from his customers, but it does show that he did not use all available resources to repay his customers when his site was "hacked".