Funny thing is, BS&T was used by a whole bunch of people and was considered really trusted. Shows how easily people get sucked into that stuff, and even now you see the same old ponzi sites pop up, get a decent amount of deposits, pay out for a couple weeks, and then vanish with a bunch of profit.
I think a lot of people took it as a game back then. That was the era when plenty of people had hundreds or even thousands of BTC obtained at low cost and they were just throwing them around not caring too much if they lost it to a scam or ponzi.
That's true. He still did make off with a ridiculous amount of money, even at the time though. I doubt that would happen today on Bitcointalk, but plenty of obvious ponzis come and scam for much smaller amounts all the time, so you never know if it could happen again or not...