We don't know if there's any "demise." IIRC, "Trendon's" name and address were used around the Internet for domain registration, which had a few connections to other people and physical addresses. IIRC (again -- remember this "happened" a year ago, and people were trying to fully dox him while he was operating), he gave a name for his designer who was previously tied to domain registrations, giving credibility to the possibility that the Trendon Shavers people discovered was Pirate. He did physically meet up with major lenders at one point, and while he did give quite a few specifics about his alleged operation then to those people, he was still very evasive. We'd have a totally different situation here if someone at the physical meetup was ballsy enough to demand Pirate present ID, which Pirate may not have faked. (OTOH, if he did have a fake one, this'd be even more of a clusterfuck)

There are definitely people other than Pirate involved with GPUMax and his lending program. At one point, he told me "I have a group of coders that had it built, I have spent a lot of time on gpumax and didnt have the time to build it so I hired it out." It's concerning none of them have publicly come out, and the SEC's made no indication of even knowing them -- it's possible they never existed. If they didn't exist, I think it highly probable that "Trendon Shavers" is not Pirate.