Here's my guesses as to what happen in order of plausibility:
1. Their story is legit and the hardware was stolen by some shady datacenter operator and FC was kidnapped or something.
2. FC was stealing electricity and he along with the hardware was taken by the police.
3. FC decided to pull an exit scam after Prisma 2.0's and BE300 turned out to be failures.
In no case do I think the scam was premeditated or that anyone other than FC was involved.
Do you honestly put 1. "James Bond-esque kidnapping operation" above 2 and 3 "trivial scams that have happened time and again in the Bitcoin ecosystem"?
What is the logic that leads you to think that 1 is more likely than 3 or 2?? Other than blind faith, I mean.
Tigggger's point about pumping the market with decent BE300 specs even though insiders knew it was all over is especially incriminating:
Speaking of shares, has anyone looked into the trading history.
Announcing a succesfull chip (BE300) and making everyone think that everything was proceeding to production, on top of the failure to mention anything about the mining farm going *cough* missing are both things that would keep the share price higher than it should have been.
But it doesn't matter, because jimmothy and roadstress would sooner eat broken glass than admit AM is now more of a scam than HF ever was.
They are committed to an eternal denial period, and will make up stupid excuses like 'well you didn't buy those shares/Tubes/Prizmas *DIRECTLY* from AM so that doesn't count' to rationalize their blind faith.