"A Ponzi scheme is an illegal business practice..." - Source. Literally the first result in Google.

Should you not trust this source, which I can understand, here are sources from official US ("Yet, both pyramid and Ponzi schemes are illegal because they inevitably must fall apart."), UK ("Legitimate trading schemes rely on valuable goods and services, while illegal pyramid schemes focus simply on recruiting more and more investors.") and Canadian ("Illegal distributions of securities sometimes involve Ponzi schemes.") websites. Obviously whether said schemes are illegal in a certain country is variable, however in most (if not all) 1st world countries such schemes are illegal.

This sort of mentality has been around on this forum longer than I have. Please stop acting like you know how this forum used to operate to try push your childish vendetta against certain members of the DT system.

And he won't do anything about it. Abuse is defined as spam or other things of the same liking. Theymos has no jurisdiction on whether a feedback is correct or not (similar to every single other member on this forum bar the feedback giver and receiver), and he does not have the time to investigate every case. This is why trust is not moderated.

Lets say I were to post on a thread of a scam service (that I knew would scam) saying "Wow, this service is great! I got 2x my profit!". Next day, this service steals all of the money invested. Do you not think I am in the wrong at all for using my position (which Newbie members would likely trust) to promote an obvious scam website?
I think that the trust is completely justifiable. If you want it removed then stop promoting Ponzi scams and contact cryptodevil in a few months and ask nicely to have it removed.

Irrelevant. New users coming across that section will see "Multiplying your Bitcoin in 2 days!" and become interested. More than likely people such as OP will help remove any doubts by vouching for a service which will eventually scam.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't like someone who promotes my service to be also promoting illegal websites which steal other people's money.

Also, sort of off topic, but I really wish people like OP would stop using the word 'blackmail' in cases like this. Cryptodevil would gain nothing by you not promoting in ponzis, he would simply be helping new users to this community to avoid scams. Please look up the definition of blackmail.

Check your FaucetBox payouts for anything out of the ordinary. If you see anything, regenerate your API key and change it in your Admin panel.

No, however it is not needed. As I said in another thread, the 'innocent until proven guilty' mantra doesn't work on this forum. All it takes is one successful con by someone to have the buyer down $100 with nothing in return. Personally, I think any steps against this are steps in the right direction.

I'll also reply to this since it's on a similar topic:
This is over exaggerating. Negative trust does not label an account as dead, and things similar to this can easily be worked out so long as some sort of reform takes place which the DT member can see. My account was tagged previously, I would not consider it to be dead by any stretch of the word.

I don't, but I can understand why some do.

Yes, exactly. As I said previously, it must work this way to try and prevent others getting scammed by people with malicious intention.

It's not extortion; the people leaving the trust get nothing of personal gain out of this. Extortion would be "I'm going to tag you with negative trust until you give me a gift card for free".
What the people in the "hatesquad" are doing is essentially a blanket attack against those who sell illegally obtained gift cards. Granted this may not be completely effective, though there isn't much of a better way to go about it.

Innocent until proven guilty doesn't work here. It has been tried several times in the past and members have been scammed out of several BTC because of it. If you want your negative trust removed, rather than bitching about it here, prove that you are getting your cards from legitimate sources and I'm sure EcuaMobi and others will be happy to remove the trust.

The problem isn't that people want to buy carded gift cards. The problem is that people are buying these gift cards believing they are legit, using them and are then running into problems when these cards are found to be illegitimate. The people selling this lose nothing from this, however the people buying them not fully understanding what they are getting into have the possibility of having their account on the service which the gift card corresponds to closed.

People are greedy and ignorant. Unless people specifically say that there will be repercussions to using stolen gift cards, people will buy them simply because they see '70% DISCOUNT'.

"I don't understand the problem with selling illegal goods, so I'm going to insult everyone that does". If you dislike the people in the default trust network then remove them from your trust list.

Why can't people just read the OP and realize that ponzis aren't added to this list.

Trying to identify alt accounts through correlation of activity times is stupid and ineffective. All that doing this proves is that they are active around the same times, which could be linked to something as general as a timezone.

So because someone's feedback makes a difference to the majority of users, they shouldn't leave the feedbacks that they did previously (which more than likely got them onto the DT list in the first place)? That logic seems a bit strange to me.

Regardless, the main difference (for me) between selling a BitcoinTalk account and a LocalBitcoins account is the risk that comes with selling one and not the other. Whilst BitcoinTalk doesn't condone selling accounts, they wouldn't terminate the account for it being sold. On the other hand, selling a LocalBitcoins account is against the ToS of the site and can result in the account being terminated and the user being left without an account or the Bitcoin they paid for it.

Unless this risk is explicitly presented during the sale (which in this case it is not), I consider a negative trust to be worthy as the OP is selling a product with an unmentioned risk, which could result in them scamming (intentional or not).

PS. You also do not need to create two threads for this. By posting repeatedly with insults simply makes you look like a child who is throwing a tantrum because they cannot get their own way.

Noobs here still trade with massively negative trusted users here and pay the price for it. If they can't put two and two together and come to the conclusion that big red words saying 'DO NOT TRUST THIS USER' means that they should perhaps not follow through with their deal, what on earth makes you think they're going to bother to look at a user's post/transaction history to come to their own conclusion?

I can't say I much agree with this. I envision scams skyrocketing should the trust system be removed due to the reason above.

Looking at this user's post quality shows that in cases like this whether the user is enrolled in a signature campaign is irrelevant to the quality of posts they create. Signature campaigns aren't the problem on this forum, the people that abuse them are.

This sounds like a pretty obvious ponzi to me, and those aren't added to this list. Sorry.

You really like shoehorning in your vendetta against the staff in every irrelevant topic you can, huh?

I don't think this really needs to be mentioned anymore; he has accepted his punishment and already started to change. There is no reason to try and make him feel worse about it.

Really? So if I ran a service working with someone like master-P, I would not be dishonest if I were to take a cut of any coins he scammed in exchange for changing them to another currency? Do you seriously believe this?

So because he had lots of points on a forum he deserves the $40k that he stole? Am I misunderstanding?

I know what happened with him, however I do not see the relevance between him and removing escrow.ms from DT1.

I expect it can, however do we really want this? While he should be remembered as being a good contributor to the forums in the past, he admitted to fraud. I can't say I'm very fond of the idea of a fraudster being automatically trusted by the system.

What I think would be the best way to go on from here would be for existing DT1 members to look through his trust list and determine which users should still be in DT, then adding them to their own trust lists to keep them there. After this, I think that it would be best if escrow.ms was removed from DT completely along with any other inactive/incapable members of DT1. Having dead weight in the default trust list may seem easier now, however it will not further down the line should anything else happen.

What do you mean by this?

I'll leave it on Pending for now and see if anything else comes up about in the future. Thank you for all your effort!

That's not a bad suggestion, I may categorize the sites once I have some free time.

Added both of these suggestions, thank you!

I try to keep the list with active sites only, however I do not have time to check over each one regularly. Feel free to post any dead sites you find and I may remove them/add them to another section.

While I tend to try not to comment on people's linguistic abilities, you are in no place to talk about reading and writing english. For example, the way you wrote this:
Made it seem like you were speaking about Staff, rather than campaign managers. Please learn more about sentence structure and context when phrasing things.

If you aren't fluent in English, that's fine. Commenting on other people's ability is not.

Sorry Mitchell.