Personally I'm not contact this admin, but I see information about selling athero group few weeks ago - just check this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5036025.msg51408664#msg51408664, it is screen with private conversation and now he wrote this message publicly in a group. So I don't think this is a joke and now I left the group.

If that was the right decision I think it was really crazy that they sold the project chat group what they were thinking about so they wanted to decide to sell the chat group