Its extremely unfair, I missed the claims process but I moved the bitcoins with random amounts to loads of different wallets in instawallet. I can prove the entire process, Richard Caetano confirmed everything, and suddenly he wasnt working there anymore. He was the only one that actually made an effort to help me and take a look at my case to see Im telling the truth :-(
Yeah, that's a bummer. I totally didn't pay much attention to this process, but it seems like a large project with few people involved.
I was gonna ask Davout, but does anyone know what his day job is? Is instawallet a company?
Instawallet was a service, provided by Paymium and Bitcoin-Central (not sure what their tie-up exactly is ... apparently they are a regulated French payment provider
... so much for the French legal system if these guys can 'confiscate' thousands of bitcoins without repercussions.It's fair to point out that Instawallet and, more critically, the funding it contained, was either bought or given to davout-n-co. We don't know the details of the transaction...nobody has seen fit to say.
It also must be pointed out that there was ample (or at least some) warning to people who funded Instawallets prior to the absorption into the Paymium/Bitcoin-Central sphere. I did personally did not take full advantage of this in a timely manner. Partially because at the time I considered davout to be probably one of the more honest and capable persons in the ecosystem, and partially because I was lazy.
Somewhere between after the transfer of control to Bitcoin-Central and the when the 'theft' occurred the text on the front page changed. No longer did it contain Jav's (the original implementor's) stern warnings about the limited security that users should expect and suitability only for minor funds. Here again, when and why this change occurred is shrouded in mystery and there seems to be limited interest on the part of the current team in providing any enlightenment.