[BitcoinMax.com] Closed

[dishwara]

Why PPT operators have to go SEC?
They from start said they just acting as pass-through only & if pirateat40 defaults, they also default.
Pirateat40 defaulted, so all other PPT's defaulted.
Game over PERIOD. 

No one has to go to the SEC.  However if this was an option to recover funds, which the PPT's said they too lost, why would they not go to the SEC is the Bigger question.

@PPT operators: what you going to do now?

[Turbor]

We gave money to strangers promising fantastic returns and paid the price for being that stupid.

Nobody will ever see a single coin of his invested money again. Ever ! No matter how many mails or pm you people write. I wish an angry bastard mod would lock this thread so we can move on.

[BCB]

Turbor,

Moving on an hopefully learning from your mistakes is certainly good advice.  

However regardless if there is a recovery of funds, I do think there will be some satisfaction when this guy is caught and prosecuted.

[Bitsky]

Good points Bitsky.

If you did nothing wrong sounds like you'd be an ideal candidate to be interviewed with the SEC.  Bitching and moaning on these channels is going to do nothing to recover your funds.  Just ask the MyBitcoin, Bitcoinica, Bitfloor creditors.

"I sent a two-digit sum to a PPT who maybe forwarded it to Pirate. Oh, and I'm not even on your continent".
That's pretty much all the information I can give.

We gave money to strangers promising fantastic returns and paid the price for being that stupid.

Nobody will ever see a single coin of his invested money again. Ever ! No matter how many mails or pm you people write. I wish an angry bastard mod would lock this thread so we can move on.

I think most have realized that by now. My loss doesn't ruin me in the slightest (I'm annoyed though, sure). But I can't understand that even those who lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are doing nothing. Talk about PR.

[makomk]

Correct. The difference would be that Pirate's scam has innocent victims while the PPT operator's scam has only one victim -- Pirate.

Not true. There's a good chance pirateat40 still has funds which could be recovered in order to partially refund investors - this has happened before in other ponzis - but if the PPT investors' funds were never invested in Pirate then there's nothing to recover.

Surely that wouldn't be a "completely separate scam" if people agreed to it? And there's no rational reason a person who invested in a PPT wouldn't be equally happy in a "synthetic PPT". You have to trust the PPT operator to pay you in either case.

If Pirate did actually pay out in full, how exactly would this hypothetical "synthetic PPT" be able to pay their investors though? They wouldn't, which means they had no intention to pay their investors regardless of whether Pirate fails, which means they themselves were operating a ponzi and scamming their investors.

[JoelKatz]

Correct. The difference would be that Pirate's scam has innocent victims while the PPT operator's scam has only one victim -- Pirate.

Not true. There's a good chance pirateat40 still has funds which could be recovered in order to partially refund investors - this has happened before in other ponzis - but if the PPT investors' funds were never invested in Pirate then there's nothing to recover.

If there were a Pirate recovery, the PPT operators would have to pay that recovery to their customers, whether they got the funds from Pirate or not.

Surely that wouldn't be a "completely separate scam" if people agreed to it? And there's no rational reason a person who invested in a PPT wouldn't be equally happy in a "synthetic PPT". You have to trust the PPT operator to pay you in either case.

If Pirate did actually pay out in full, how exactly would this hypothetical "synthetic PPT" be able to pay their investors though? They wouldn't, which means they had no intention to pay their investors regardless of whether Pirate fails, which means they themselves were operating a ponzi and scamming their investors.

They would pay their investors out of their own funds. I'm not sure how you know they wouldn't. This actually would have been a really, *really* good bet. And you could cut your losses at any time by passing funds to Pirate. It's actually a very sensible business model.

[guruvan]

Seems likely the SEC will go to the PPT operators, rather than the other way around. I would imagine that they are all concerned about their own liability in this.

In fact, the synthetic PPT wasn't hypothetical, it just closed before Pirate did. One might more properly refer to such a thing as a naked credit default swap. It was listed on MPEx, and yes it would have paid out of pocket in the event of a pirate default (effectively producing a short position on pirate for the issuer)

[ehmdjii]

i know i am terribly late, and i will be ridiculed a lot, but are people actually still buying pirate debt? i have a 17 BTC bitcoinmax account to sell.

[Ente]

i know i am terribly late, and i will be ridiculed a lot, but are people actually still buying pirate debt? i have a 17 BTC bitcoinmax account to sell.

Pirate debt is worthless now, even the last people who bought for less than one % stopped buying it.
If you want to help to get something back from Pirate: Here is your chance:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120759.0

Ente

[Bitsky]

I still would like a PM with my last balance and deposits too.

[ErebusBat]

Me too, but I doubt I will get it.

[iCEBREAKER]

E&G, quit ignoring us!
I want my detailed info from my accounts, I am needing the info to build a legal case again Trendon.

Why would pirate's accomplice help you?

It's been clear for a long time which side he's on.

Dude practically drove the get-away car.

[00null]

E&G, quit ignoring us!
I want my detailed info from my accounts, I am needing the info to build a legal case again Trendon.

When you had an account with BitcoinMax your contract partner was Ian Grice (paybtc/E&G). So maybe it would be the best to build a legal case against Ian. That way he would at least most probably start to respond.
At one point in time Trendon wanted to have the accounts transfered to him. If Ian had complied, you could go direct for Tendon. Unfortunately, or deliberately?, Ian decided to protect Trendon and keep the accounts. Now Trendon has an additional shield, because only Ian had a contract with him, and Ian is apparently no longer interested. I assume he had profited enough.

[Shadow383]

E&G, quit ignoring us!
I want my detailed info from my accounts, I am needing the info to build a legal case again Trendon.

When you had an account with BitcoinMax your contract partner was Ian Grice (paybtc/E&G). So maybe it would be the best to build a legal case against Ian. That way he would at least most probably start to respond.
At one point in time Trendon wanted to have the accounts transfered to him. If Ian had complied, you could go direct for Tendon. Unfortunately, or deliberately?, Ian decided to protect Trendon and keep the accounts. Now Trendon has an additional shield, because only Ian had a contract with him, and Ian is apparently no longer interested. I assume he had profited enough.

Ian is almost certainly on an incredibly dodgy legal footing, having made huge profit by perpetuating fraud.

So yeah, I'd sue him if I'd been dumb enough to put money into this scheme.

[Bitsky]

Ian is almost certainly on an incredibly dodgy legal footing, having made huge profit by perpetuating fraud.

So yeah, I'd sue him if I'd been dumb enough to put money into this scheme.

When you had an account with BitcoinMax your contract partner was Ian Grice (paybtc/E&G). So maybe it would be the best to build a legal case against Ian. That way he would at least most probably start to respond.
At one point in time Trendon wanted to have the accounts transfered to him. If Ian had complied, you could go direct for Tendon. Unfortunately, or deliberately?, Ian decided to protect Trendon and keep the accounts. Now Trendon has an additional shield, because only Ian had a contract with him, and Ian is apparently no longer interested. I assume he had profited enough.

Or maybe he has not sent coins (all or just a part of them) to Pirate at all. If you knew right from the start that Pirate never planned to pay back, you could add your own scam on top of it. With the result that the blame goes to Pirate. He just needed to pay the bit of interest which investors requested, something that worked out fine as long as new investors joined; and that worked until Pirate defaulted. With his explanation of "coin ownership change" (see below) he broke the traceability of coins. So even if you could prove that an address holding BMax coins is under his control he could simply say that's because he invested the amount from his other wallet. With this in mind it would be foolish for him to officially acknowledge BMax balances because during a lawsuit it would show that his BST account had less coins than the sum investors sent to him.

an example of that would be let's say to start with i have 200 btc which i keep here:

BST wallet   100   i own 100% of these coins
My wallet   100   i own 100% of these coins

then, a bitcoinmax lender decides to invest 40 btc (sending it to MY wallet), the ownership changes immediately to:

BST wallet   100   i own 60 of these coins, and the bitcoinmax lender owns the other 40
My wallet   140   i own 100% of these coins

then if BST stops paying, i've lost 60 btc, and the bitcoinmax lender has lost 40 btc, even though the actual 40 bitcoins that he sent are still unspent in my own personal wallet.

[poly]

Ian is almost certainly on an incredibly dodgy legal footing, having made huge profit by perpetuating fraud.

So yeah, I'd sue him if I'd been dumb enough to put money into this scheme.

When you had an account with BitcoinMax your contract partner was Ian Grice (paybtc/E&G). So maybe it would be the best to build a legal case against Ian. That way he would at least most probably start to respond.
At one point in time Trendon wanted to have the accounts transfered to him. If Ian had complied, you could go direct for Tendon. Unfortunately, or deliberately?, Ian decided to protect Trendon and keep the accounts. Now Trendon has an additional shield, because only Ian had a contract with him, and Ian is apparently no longer interested. I assume he had profited enough.

Or maybe he has not sent coins (all or just a part of them) to Pirate at all. If you knew right from the start that Pirate never planned to pay back, you could add your own scam on top of it. With the result that the blame goes to Pirate. He just needed to pay the bit of interest which investors requested, something that worked out fine as long as new investors joined; and that worked until Pirate defaulted. With his explanation of "coin ownership change" (see below) he broke the traceability of coins. So even if you could prove that an address holding BMax coins is under his control he could simply say that's because he invested the amount from his other wallet. With this in mind it would be foolish for him to officially acknowledge BMax balances because during a lawsuit it would show that his BST account had less coins than the sum investors sent to him.

an example of that would be let's say to start with i have 200 btc which i keep here:

BST wallet   100   i own 100% of these coins
My wallet   100   i own 100% of these coins

then, a bitcoinmax lender decides to invest 40 btc (sending it to MY wallet), the ownership changes immediately to:

BST wallet   100   i own 60 of these coins, and the bitcoinmax lender owns the other 40
My wallet   140   i own 100% of these coins

then if BST stops paying, i've lost 60 btc, and the bitcoinmax lender has lost 40 btc, even though the actual 40 bitcoins that he sent are still unspent in my own personal wallet.

This is very informative and is a great point. It's possible that E&G/Bitcoinmax was running their own ponzi and not actually investing any of the coins into BTS&T, or very small amounts into it.

[theboss]

The thing that bothers me the most is that he still posts all around the forum except for this one thread that he started.

[Shadow383]

The thing that bothers me the most is that he still posts all around the forum except for this one thread that he started.

I think that's called "Ignore the multi-million dollar fraud and hope it goes away"

And holy shit, only on here could people know someone's name and not chase them for that amount of money 

[iCEBREAKER]

The thing that bothers me the most is that he still posts all around the forum except for this one thread that he started.

I think that's called "Ignore the multi-million dollar fraud and hope it goes away"

And holy shit, only on here could people know someone's name and not chase them for that amount of money 

It's amazing that this proven scammer/scam-enabler doesn't get tagged as such, yet Matthew gets it for daring to make an obviously fake joke bet.

Double-standard much BTCtalk?

[strello]

No, he just changed his name again.

In Bitcoinmax days he was "payb.tc". He went quiet for a while, then became "E&G"- (IanG- get it?) until this recent interest in this thread.

Now he has become "User25846".

He still has his 2673 post count, and "Hero" status.

I think it's really out of order that theymos is allowing him to pull this namechanging act every so often.

He always openly stated that if pirate defaulted any invested BTC would be lost, so I don't know if he deserves a scammer tag. But then, who can tell if he ever actually sent pirate any coins?

His contact info can be found here:  http://www.sitetrail.com/payb.tc