The pool & the remaining pools, running the latest version of stratum & MPOS were either buggy or hacked.  I spotted that the wallet balances were fluctuating wildly and thought it was due to some strange coin related confirmation bug, but in the end, one of two things happened -- either miners got overpaid a lot or a successful hack against the pools was executed.  Either way, I will be investigating this further this weekend and will email every pool participant to confirm their information before refunding their account balances.  No scam here -- I am working with another pool operator who is having the same symptoms to try to identify where this is coming from.  According to his research there's some scripts that hackers originating from Asia use, who DDOS the RPC wallet port while injecting high invalid hash rates, which allows them to inject wrong data into mysql...  Basically theft -- though I am not convinced that it's not a software bug, yet.

TIPS Hardfork FAQ

Q: Why a wallet-update that is causing a fork?
A: At some point in the recent past an attacker started to orphanize every and all blocks of all other TIPS miners.
The attacker was seemingly able to deliberatly orphanize any block or group of blocks he wished and claim them for himself.
Ahmed aka mrbodz kindly provided a new wallet source based on latest Feathercoin sources that uses ACP,
advanced checkpointing which counters this possible attack vector. Actually the new wallet would use the same blockchain as before,
but would refuse to accept series of blocks that orphanize large numbers of previous (honestly) mined blocks.
So as soon as the first attack started the new and improved wallet forked and stuck to the blocks of honest miners.