It is a great disappointment to see a user with a very strong reputation on the forum to do such an unthinkable gesture. yogg has a +30 Trust score (and, I believe, before this incident his Trust score was even greater). He was active on the forum for almost a decade and his reputation preceded him. His project -- Cold Key cards -- was impressive and he also organized
a great contest in parallel with the 10th anniversary of the forum.
I said all these without ever interacting with him; I only saw his activity inside the forum. And I can say that I was impressed by tenacity shown regarding his project.
However, without following his activity, I remember that, at some point, I saw a post made by him where he was saying that he has no motivation to continue the project. He seemed very depressed. Unfortunately, I can't find that post anymore. However, I found another post, where he was apologizing for his behavior and, without knowing the real situation, I believe that he did not deliver some already paid cards (highlight is mine).
Really I would like to thank everyone expecting items from me for the last year for your understanding and patience.
No one chose to take the refunds I offered, everyone preferred to wait it through and get the Coldkeys. [...]
Some of you are still waiting for me to get back to them.
I chose to take care of the outstanding orders in a specific way, so expect a message from me shortly.
I present to you my humblest apologies for how unprofessionally the situation was handled on my end.
This will not repeat itself. I know why that happened, and I'm rebuilding everything in a way to prevent that from happening.
Now even without
personally knowing yogg (meaning that I could not know about the gambling addiction mentioned here by others), only from the forum,
this first incident would represent a serious alarm trigger for me.
However, he moved on apparently --
and only apparently -- until now.
Once more, the words I said a while ago represented a sad truth:
The bigger the reputation is, the bigger chances are for an user to make a transaction. As well, the opposite is true: an attempt of scam or a violation of a contract may ruin a reputation.
If at the first incident people still gave him some more credibility, he did not take advantage of that. For some reasons, yogg chose to completely ruin his reputation here. It is very unfortunate as, excepting his reputation he also lost his project, his customers, his incomes and so on. I believe his project was working well and, with some moderation, he was able to live from it. Now this chance is gone and, if he really has a gambling addiction then, most likely, even the scammed money will be soon gone.
And even if he will pay back all scammed victims, this will not change things back to the way they were. Maybe some will delete their negative feedbacks; maybe the flag created on his name will become inactive; yet none of these will give him the most important thing he lost:
his credibility.