If you're confident about both your legal position and your projected earnings then you should consider pitching your idea to the VCs on Dragon's Den.  Not only might you get some decent funding, but even if none of the VCs give you money, a whole lot more Brits will learn that Bitcoin exists.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/aps/apply.shtml

I have forwarded my application for the position of Head Teller.  As you're no doubt aware, in the world of conventional banking the primary qualifications required for this position are being middle aged and bitchy, criteria against which I'm confident I will easily surpass other candidates.

And not everyone who infringes copyright gets caught for it, either.  So what?  "But they did it too" is the defence of school children.

PayPal has acted against people selling BTC often enough in the past that users who read these forums should be well aware of the risks involved.  If you knowingly take that risk, you don't have much cause for complaint if you get caught - you knew it could happen.  And the other BTC sellers won't have any cause for complaint when they get caught either.

The other seller you linked doesn't only sell BTC, which may allow him to argue that he's not operating as a currency dealer or currency exchange.

There is no legitimate, lawful reason for Nefario to make the provision of user information to asset-issuers contingent upon the return of all over payments.  None.  According to other shareholders, BG has a small amount of BTC reserves of its own.  Those reserves should be used to top-up any short-fall in returned funds and after that if there's still a short-fall then Nefario should be buying the required BTC with his credit card.

It's pretty obvious that Nefario doesn't want GLBSE's own funds used to top-up any short-fall because he still wants to be paid for last month's work from those funds.

At this point, I hope there's a UK asset issuer who's willing to take legal proceedings to compel him to hand over their user list.  The onus would be on Nefario to provide a good reason for not doing so and any judge would laugh at him if he pulled the "waiting for overpayments to be returned" bullshit.

I'm pretty sure these been a case where MtGox has inadvertently paid twice before, but it sounds like you're saying that you initiated two withdrawals for the same amount.  You definitely need your MtGox history. 

I'm kind of stunned that so many people don't keep their own records of past transactions.  At least print out your transaction history once a month or something.  You're all going to be screwed if the MtGox database fucks up in some way and you have no records of your own.

FTFY

 

Charlie, I think you need a better class of clientèle.

Goat was arguing that Nefario shouldn't have been given the scammer tag for the reasons it was given (he thought it should have been given for other reasons).  He did seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing a lot lately, but the forum membership's going to drop dramatically if we start banning everyone who does that occasionally.

I'm not sure how much of his business Goat conducted off-board, but I hope that anyone who's dependent on the records he holds in relation to pirate and GLBSE has another way to communicate with him.

Victims pursuing civil action on their own is likely to be an expensive and futile exercise.  The SEC has the power to litigate this on behalf of the victims, but you can't recover assets you can't locate.  If they have sufficient evidence of his activities then they can use that as leverage to try to persuade him to agree to give back any remaining funds (this would likely be done via someone similar to a liquidator, so there probably wouldn't be much left after their fees were paid). 

The bar for criminal prosecution is significantly higher and it appears to be the Office of the US Attorney which prosecutes ponzis.  Getting in touch with the US Attorney for Trendon's district might not be a bad idea.  Again, how far this goes will depend on hard evidence but it's not going to hurt to have Trendon on the radars of as many investigators as possible.

While the SEC operates at federal level, Trendon has likely committed multiple offences at state level too.  I have no idea who the relevant state authorities would be in relation to investment fraud/ponzis but it might be worth checking that out.  It could be a fall-back position if the SEC investigation ends up going nowhere.

Are the real life identities of all of the PPT operators even known (no need to put their RL identities here, I'm just curious about whether we actually know the identities of the people who hold a lot of evidence)?

Do we even have a list of all the people who attended the Las Vegas meet-up? 

Like it or not, the PPT operators were an integral part of this particular scam and there can be no meaningful investigation of Trendon's ponzi without their activities also being examined.

You didn't look very hard for updates.  The first hearing before the High Court of NZ is happening a week from today.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109316.msg1243849#msg1243849

The liquidator's second report to creditors is where you usually start to get a better idea of possible distributions.

There's also never been any evidence provided of him being given 500k BTC.  As far as I can tell, when people trot out the USD 5 million figure they're talking about what they believe he "owes" including compounded interest, not the principal they "invested" with him less any payments they received.

Did you mean for you post to read


because that's how your post reads in conjunction with your signature.

You don't think that the scammers have given this place a bad enough reputation already?  Hell, why not go the whole hog and invite violentacrez to make these forums his new home?

That's an incredibly subjective benchmark, especially on a forum whose first principal is free speech.

A lot of possible solutions require a fair bit of active moderation.  Splitting derailed threads works well of you can do it quickly enough.  You can split and lock the derailment and send it to some wasteland forum, but you need to be able to catch the derailment when it first happens otherwise it's a pain in the ass to do it manually once you've got a couple of pages of legitimate posts interspersed with derailing posts.

The information wants to be freeeeee.

Americans tend to call lawyers "attorneys".  "Lawyer" is just a generic term for legal counsel.  We actually have solicitors, barristers and Special Counsel (formerly Queen's Counsel) here but people tend not to make the distinction in everyday speech unless they're trying to impress or intimidate someone - if you're paying $3000+ per day for a barrister, you tend to want people to know about it.

There's zero reason to believe that anything pirate told anyone - including the pass-through operators - was the truth.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120119.msg1294044#msg1294044

His former employers, The Lending Partners (where one of his partners in GPUMax also worked), have a few things to say about pirate, too.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119590.msg1289098#msg1289098

pirate told people what they wanted to hear - as all good conmen do.  He played to people's vanity and greed and found the mother-lode of both in this community.

LOL.  Being endorsed by Franky is like being recommended by usagi, Nefario or Genjix.  It's the kiss of death.

People aren't talking about "going to the police".  The SEC in the US contacted some OTC members wanting information about pirate's operation (among other things, including GLBSE).  Ponzis like pirate's fall squarely within the jurisdiction of the SEC.  It's precisely because people realise that they're unlikely to see any of their funds back that some of them want to see pirate's life made uncomfortable by the authorities.  

Why should the fact that other people who get scammed mightn't get help from the authorities affect whether or not members of this community accept help from the authorities when those authorities come knocking?