Yes, they do that and there is a very clear case of trust abuse happening with me. I am not engaged in any shady active here, even I don't earn form signatures by posting here and there is nothing scammy I have done which should state Warning: Trade with extreme caution!.

This is how they try to mob anyone here who tries to speak in some truth about there manipulative works. This is a clear case of lowering the value of once reputed account, without any prove of it being compressed.

After investigation, I consider the evidence to be most strongly consistent with the hypothesis that his email account was hacked and then used to take his forum account.

He has the same email address as before, but it's @gmx.com, and we all know how secure that is. The forum account was first newly-accessed via email-reset rather than by password. IP evidence is also generally suggestive of it not being the same person. I also find his general behavior to be suspicious.

I asked him some challenge questions related to data I have and the real BTC_Bear should know, but his answers were only half-correct, and are more consistent with having access to a bunch of emails going back to at least 2011 than having actually lived it.

However, while he definitely wouldn't have enough evidence to recover the account if he didn't already have access to it, I have enough doubt that I'm not willing to lock the account at this time. There are plausible explanations for the above evidence against him, and if he is a hacker, he's done an unusually large amount of research, at least. I'd say that there's a 25% chance of him being the original BTC_Bear.

I don't have alternative contact info for BTC_Bear or I'd try contacting him. He was very active on #bitcoin-otc IIRC; maybe someone can try asking nanotube or the other #bitcoin-otc regulars.

BTW, I'd like to take this opportunity to recognize & thank the original BTC_Bear (whether or not he is the current account owner), who on several occasions went to considerable effort to contribute to the forum in the early days.