Whats this investigation from Ukyo and Burnside mentioned?? You guys are so vague sometimes, its no wonder this thread is complete garbage. Every time you post information, post sources, or links, or quotes... SOMETHING
Its amature hour here, most of these kids shouldn't be allowed to invest.
If this is a scam, I could have pulled a better scam than this, why wouldn't "Sam" just post blurry pics of a some chips? or Post some fake docs to "Prove" who he is?
It's all assumptions either way, look at what has been provided? next to nothing, If any half decent scammer would know is you want to push up the share price by providing what ever fake docs you can, it would cost a few hundred at best to produce some photo shopped pics of chips/ boards/ ID ect.
If this is not a scam and they can gain 1% of the network, ill be looking at a nice gain of ~50BTC, My little risk may or may not pay off.
If it is a scam, there's a tiny chance that he is so scared and then decided to return all remaining BTCs (may be more than half of 7000BTC).
If it's not, then things may actually be worse. Now you have a completely imcompetent people spending his casual time on managing an almost hopeless company. He will continue throwing the rest BTC to the third party people to try to fix the 130nm chips and try to design a 65nm chip by randomly searching from the forum and contacting them with freechat. Although neither of the two tasks is 'mission impossible', their success both require a lot of efforts, passion, and talents. Do you think this 'Sam' has any of those virtues? In my opinion, the chance for him to succeed is even lower than the probability of a scammer to refund the victims under enough pressure.
As an investor who knows the company he invested has no hope will always do, please try the best to fire the CEO, sell everything remaining, and get the money back as much as possible.
No matter this is a scam or not, the best thing to do now is try to force 'Sam' to refund the money to each investor and return all (if any) useful assets (design and chips) to someone trustworthy here.