I think it's pretty much the opposite. In absolute terms you will generally make more running an exit scam than operating legitimately, for far less effort. When I was running Just-Dice, I was taking 10% commission on profits, which is a healthy amount. The site profited by around 20k, so I was able to take around 2k in commission. When I shut the site down the bankroll was in the region of 50k. That's 50k that I could have just kept rather than returning. By returning it, I turned down the chance of "earning" 25 times more than I had earned in the previous year of hard work. I will likely never earn that much again, so the argument that "trusted people won't scam because they earn more by being honest" doesn't work. You make more stealing than you do being honest. Which, I guess, is why we see so many people stealing.


It's conceivable that he went into the escrow business with a view to running it legitimately, and only decided to scam when it turned out not to be worth running honestly. (Or, maybe the fairy tale about hackers is true; who knows!)


I'm half considering setting up an automated escrow service for signature campaign managers to use to escrow to safeguard payments to campaign members. But seeing you and Blazed both write about how it's all too much hassle, I'm having second thoughts.

Do you think people would use a service like that if there was a small percentage fee to cover expenses?