I'm a neutral bystander to all of this. Do not judge me, I'm speaking for most people.
VIOU is correct with his response to this situation. This was out of line. But, the effort put into this is appreciated.
I've read every single page of every thread about all of this. Nothing out of this was accomplished besides getting a few dishonest people banned. Hurray, a few more users have been banned. Boo for users like me who have other thoughts about our staff.
The two major point's VIOU made: About the only memorable name which is Time To Buy, and Fire Z's GP LOTTERY THREAD. Both of these actions just weeded out random users. Nothing serious had occurred out of this. No "Big Names" were threaded out.
In my opinion, if a scam were to happen, it would be for big payouts. Not a petty ones. No smart scammer would risk getting banned for trying to scam a moderater. It's pointless to try. I do understand that people made billion dollar accusations towards this, it's just typical scammers. Like you guys say, obvious scammer is obvious.
Yes, Time To Buy is banned. It's the only big name out of any there. He only said 300M (Amount he wanted to scam). It's just barely more then his donation amount. He even noted that it was false. (IDK what is his current situation ATM, But idc.) If he actually is telling the truth, This would be the biggest fail. So if he is innocent, please tell me what big time guy was banned? How has the community been saved?
@Staff, I do not agree with this one bit. You created false advertisement towards the users on sythe. Blowing up the idea that a very trusted users MSN is hacked doesn't create a good sense of safety here on sythe. In the end it won't make users like to use sythe, or prefer it over other websites because it is more "safe". The only outcome out of this is that hacking occurs here on sythe.
What if this whole operation was actually true, and people did get scammed? The staff would blow it off as a way to catch scammers. Essentially, they would just ban whoever had evidence to cover up for themselves. If 10Bil was scammed, lets say thats $5k, split that between 5 staff members and they all made $1k each. I love our staff and don't see our staff ever doing this. If it did happen, how would we ever know?
@Govind, you said...
...Whether you agree with it or not, entrapment is a legitimate tactic to remove scammers, and it's worked on over a dozen users here...
Entrapment is illegal according to US laws, why should you do it on sythe?
These are the things I think about now. Personally, I dont plan to trade on sythe because of this. This whole operation was just abuse of power. It's the slow start of powerbot.