He's definitely doing something
Either some of the transactions are fake, or this guy lost a lot of money for the purposes of building up trust.
I'm sure there are some legitimate reasons for someone to drop a lot of money to build up trust quickly. Maybe his reputation is going to help him do some fantastic, honest, business deals in future.
If you ask me though, there's something fundamentally suspicious about a man who runs a high yield investment program at a loss to himself for the purposes of building trust quickly. It screams "confidence scam"
Of course most people here lack the critical faculties to recognize this.
I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation that he spent 898.320 BTC on interest. That's actually on overestimate as I assumed a uniform 2% throughout (did not account for the change to 1.5%), among other things.
If you take that as being about USD $9,000 (again, rough calculation), to put things in more familiar terms, you can ask: is that really a big deal?
For most people, it's a big deal. But if you are a wealthy person who has money to put into bitcoin, maybe not.
He did claim to put money into loans and other projects. So that could offset some of the cost, perhaps.
In that vein, if vescudero expected a fall in bitcoin price, he could have been pursuing the following strategy:
Step 1: Borrow lots of bitcoin
Step 2: Sell it for fiat
Step 3: Bitcoin price crashes
Step 4: But back bitcoin to pay back depositors
Step 5: Profit
If the strategy works, you make big money. If the strategy fails, you only lose a fraction of what you stood to gain, i.e. (in this case) around $9,000.
Just some random, hopefully interesting thoughts.
If people want to continue accusing vescudero of scamming, it would be interesting to look at the list of depositors and see how many no established reputation, small post counts, and/or login patterns that support being socks. (I suspect you will find this data to *not* substantiate scamming accusations, but I don't know for certain. For the record, he currently has a well-deserved positive rating from me on bitcoin-otc.)