You have to look at TradeFortress' situation from a legal perspective.
In circa 2013, TradeFortress was running a website (Inputs.io) that offered custodial services for its customers, and something happened that resulted in Inputs.io not being able to honor customer deposits. According to TradeFortress at the time, this was because of a hack of a hosting provider they were using, and according to some community members, this was because TradeFortress decided to steal some of the money belonging to Inputs.io customers.
This was because Inputs.io was hacked, not because I decided to steal money belonging to my customers.
Regardless of the underlying root cause, it is very likely that TradeFortress had liability when Inputs.io could not honor customer deposits. This is an important detail.
Subsequent to the alleged hack, TradeFortress prioritized deposit claims of those with larger amounts owed by Inputs.io. IMO, by doing this, he lowered the likelihood of being pursued by customers -- in effect, he did not honor deposit obligations of his smaller customers (the customers who would have the least incentives to aggressively pursue him).
No, I didn't. I did my best to reimburse customers with the remaining balance, both small and big. Later on, thanks to buying Ethereum in the ICO, I was able to reimburse a much greater portion of creditors.
In any litigation, any statements you make can potentially be used against you. So pirate40 for example decided to stop posting on the forum so that anything he wrote could not be used against him in court. pirate40 ended up going to prison anyway, although, by the time his enterprise collapsed, there were no lingering questions if he was running a scam. Other scammers simply stopped using their accounts after their account was no longer able to produce income for them -- some of these scammers may still be here, operating under different names.
After Inputs.io collapsed, many months elapsed, and TradeFortress made statements on the forum that IMO reduced the likelihood of being pursued in court for deposits he did not honor. For example, TradeFortress tried to join a signature campaign, despite allegedly having millions of dollars worth of stolen coin (value at the time). I might point out that obtaining a judgment against someone with no assets will only get you a bill from your attorney.
I'm still here because I didn't do anything wrong. I wouldn't have tried joining a signature campaign if I was sitting on millions of dollars of bitcoins, lol.
Fast forward a year or two, there was a somewhat similar situation with another company, called
hashie that was involved in cloud mining.
Based on what happened when hashie imploded, I believe it was a scam, although it is possible what happened was the result of TradeFortress' immaturity. AMhash, then the entity that hashie was reselling cloud mining contracts for, imploded very shortly after hashie imploded -- I think this probably points to TradeFortress potentially having lines of communication with AMhash that went dead before it was publically known that AMhash was imploding and TradeFortress deciding to maximize his profit from his company.
If you believe that hashie was a scam, a reasonable person might belive that Inputs.io was also a scam. In any case, it appears that TradeFortress is not able to cover edge cases of security issues.
Hashie imploded because AMHash, who was the seller of the underlying hash rate, decided to exit scam.
I had no lines of communication with AMHash that indicated it would be a scam. Why would I choose a supplier that I knew to be a scam? I was trying to operate a legit cloud mining platform.
If anyone can recover funds from the Inputs.io hacker, or AMHash, they are welcome to 35% of all recovered proceeds (thousands and hundreds of BTC).
Any other questions?