Most scammers over the years will either pay back some amount, or claim that they are going to until everyone forgets. Usually it's just a matter of waiting a month or so before some even bigger scam or other catastrophe eclipses it. So, nothing very 'innovative' here.
I beg to differ. If TF actually refunds ~70% to everyone, and handles the loudy people one by one, he will soon be a hero again.
That's a very clever move in my opinion, much better than any previous scam.
Paymium/Bitcoin-Central did much better. They seem to have refunded almost all Instawallet customers. The (supposed) hack took place at a value peak, and they price was cut by half by the time they payed out so (if they were scamming) they could have choosen one option or the other depending on what the price did.
One way or another, they ended up with the unclaimed Instawallet funds which were significant. Most of them they probably got from Jav (original Instawallet developer) for a bargin if they even paid him anything at all.
If the Instwallet thing was a scam, it was well played, and if it was not, they came out well financially anyway. So 'nicely done' one way or another.
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I thought most people sensed that Tradefortress was pretty shady. For whatever reason I abruptly stopped reading about inputs.io when I saw him attached to it.
Thankfully I some time ago started to consider an affiliation with bitcointalk.org to be indicative of someone being a potential scammer. Unfortunately I suspect that a lot of newbies will be mis-guided by such an affiliation which is, I suspect, "not a bug but rather a feature" as they say.