I see several crucial mistakes, and I'm going to point them out because I really don't get why people keep doing this:
Mistakes made- Depositing before downloading, saving and verifying the Letter of Guarantee
- Sending a large amount of Bitcoin to a relatively small and unknown service
- Sending your entire Bitcoin savings at once to a third party
- Keeping your life savings entirely in Bitcoin
All of this means you literally have no proof whatsoever to backup your claims, while you could and should have had a signed message. But even then, a one-man operation could be very tempted to take such a large (and for many people life-changing) amount of Bitcoin.
Selective scamming has happened before and will happen again. It's trival to add an "if amount large enough, then don't return it"-setting to the server routines.
I'm following this case to see how it evolves. In a similar (but much smaller) case
the mixer said the funds were sent to a different address:
I do not know the reason for this, had we have LoG we could confirm whether it was an user error, or a malicious actor's doing.
Sorry I am a noob here, and jumped to a lot of conclusions. I didnt read anyting, just hovered over the situation. I am surprised such services exist, even with escrow How does that work? 3rd party arbitration?
But after reading about these exit scams etc, is it not clear that 3 weeks later and not a peep, his 13BTC is gone?
I still stand by my opinion, only and idiot would use such a service if they are legitimate, or a criminal would need such services.