I found myself wondering the exact same thing as I was reading the original post. To put it bluntly, bitlane is acting way too dumb for someone who supposedly has $25k to throw around on adventures like this. If I were pulling off a scam of this proportion (I heard pirate had 500k BTC?), I'd definitely have quite a few sock puppets set up to cause as much doubt/confusion, false hope, and general trolling as possible starting right about now. The scammer would definitely want to be in control of the dialogue.

Also, if it's a ~$5 million scam, I imagine he's preparing for more than a few private investigators (and perhaps even law enforcement) to start looking for him, so I imagine he's put quite a bit of effort into making sure he's as anonymous as possible, setting up false trails, etc.

gpumax.com, which is linked from his profile, is registered to:

Don Shrents
5100 Eldorado Pkwy
Mckinney, Texas 75070

Which seems to be a fake name at a strip mall (http://goo.gl/maps/i3iPA). Why would someone register a domain under a fake name instead of just anonymizing it like most people do? Maybe he wanted to save a few $, or maybe he wanted to remain anonymous in case of a legal inquiry with the registrar.

Several of his investors claim to know his "his name, birthdate, current city, and a previous city he lived in", saying it's "publicly available to anyone who cares enough to thoroughly research it" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50822.400). I'm no PI, but I found nothing of the sort, and I imagine I'm not the only one who was curious. If this is a scam, I'd hypothesize they are puppets, as well.

His OTC ratings might be a good place to figure out how "real" he is, also... would any of the people who claimed to trade with him over PayPal be willing to reveal the email he used? Are they real people, or part of the ruse?

I definitely don't have the time/skills to dive deeply into this, but it does make me wish I'd decided to be an investigative reporter