Lying is quite wrong either way. Whether smaram lied about ever having the FPGA, or is lying now trying to cover up the scam.
Fallacy of the excluded middle: it is entirely possible he is telling the truth, and was scammed just like the rest of these poor suckers. Now please consider this:
https://imgur.com/aRET8GDI too want to see the pics he has promised (there, and at other times), but I do not take his standoffish response to accusations here as being at all unexpected or unnatural, when he has been dealing with such for a couple of weeks now.
Compound that with the stress of moving company headquarters out of country (that is why he has been in Berlin), and it's all pretty understandable to me; I've been out of country for months at a time, and cannot imagine the frustration of being put in the situation he is being put in here.
Furthermore, occam's razor for me says it is just highly unlikely that someone preoccupied with running one of the more successful and complex cryptonote projects would want to get involved with some stupid scam, in such a public way, with no escape route.
In the end, what are the facts regarding Saber? He claims to have been shipped the unit he ordered, he said that it worked, but not well, and he said he would provide pics when he returns home. Could he have been shipped the unit? Why not -- the dwarf scammers obviously had one "working" prototype (which just remote-controlled a rig, imho), which they could easily have shipped to him, after creating their now-deleted youtube videos.
That explanation fits the facts just fine, and is what I will be going with until presented with some actual evidence to the contrary.
I think the purpose here is to try to track down the scammers. Will we ever get the money back? Maybe not, but it would be good to try. Otherwise we become rationalizing sheep.
Questions still remain. How did he get knowledge of the unit to be shipped a prototype? Was it on the same web store that he got informed of before anyone else did? Was there a tracking number from the courier? What was the pick-up address from the courier? Which country? And so on. IF he had the device it would be helpful to provide some details on where to track where this device came from. If he never had the device, let him claim so. So far he's defensive, which is normal for someone scared of being accused as an accessory to a $2M crime of theft. But avoiding honest questions or being dodgy makes people suspicious and assume the worst.