You acted like you never heard of all these issues and now you have a different story. I don't know who got the BFL ad money but whoever did should give it back. BFL is in receivership so they can be contacted about distributing the funds to those that got ripped off. Of course you guys probably won't pay it just like HSBC executives won't give back their bonuses.
so let me get this straight: because I wasn't criticizing BFL you want me to "give the money back", even though I wasn't staff when I made that statement and I didn't receive a satoshi from BFL.
I said I don't know who got what but anyone who got some of the BFL ad money should give it back. Don't you agree?
That is ridiculous. The forum does not moderate scams, end of discussion. If a company that is scamming is advertising on the forum then it is still up to users to do their due diligence about the company. Even though BFL was doing things that were less then ethical, their customers did eventually get what they paid for and some were able to ROI on their investment on BFL miners.
If the forum was to verify beyond any doubt that any advertiser was not a scam then they would not be able to have any advertisements at all.
A TV station or a newspaper will not verify the statements made in an advertisement that they receive money to publish, so why should the forum be any different?
You are just making up stuff up. TV and newspapers all have standards and they reject ads on a regular basis. You are correct in that a company is not liable for running ads that turn out to be fraudulent unless they conspire with that company to rip people off. Nobody ever said anything about verifying adverters "less than ethical" or "verify beyond any doubt" or policing advertisers beyond what is reasonable. I am talking about conspiring with companies to run ads for the purposes of ripping people off and to promote fake investment schemes and fake banks.
Irrespective of the legal liability I am also saying the funds should be returned because that is the correct thing to do under the circumstances. What is your argument for not returning the money? Some newcomers tried to get involved in Bitcoin and it is their fault they were tricked by the people who run this site? Is that how the self-proclaimed "Libertarians" here think? Is that the replacement for the current "corrupt" financial system?
At the time the ads were placed BFL was delivering miners to their customers. Yes they had massive delays but there was not solid evidence they were mining for longer then they needed to with customer machines. Also the FTC only alleges that BFL was mining for two days with each customer machine which is much less then the total time of delays, so the majority of the delays in shipment was not due to fraud.
The media does reject advertisements occasionally however there is a very high threshold to reject an ad, and BFL came nowhere near this threshold.
Who are you suggesting the money be returned to? BFL? Have you been buying up customer orders at a discount hoping to be able to cash in on potential refunds from BFL?
The only "evidence" that you presented is that someone was asking for the forum to stop running BFL ads, this proves nothing. At the time there was not enough evidence to suggest that BFL was truly a scam, although many people though it was. Your next thread only proved that theymos held money on behalf of GBLSE which also proves nothing. I forget what the third thread was about but also nothing
