The problem now (as you rightly put it) is that even if it were a one person behind the project somehow a message could have been relayed to explain what was happening. If he were to return to the forum Whirlwind will not be able to recover from the loss of trust even if something happened to physically stop him from operating the Whirlwind website.
The Whirlwind forum representative was active during the early days and was definitely knowledgable, you could tell by the posts he was making he knew a lot about what he posted about. He answered questions and made comments. There were no real signs anything untoward was going on or was going to happen. The 12% APR anonymity mining maybe was the first opportunity to guess they could be stretching it a bit but again the word hindsight is apt here.
With the lack of proper email support going back months and lack of withdrawal for both signature campaign participants and customers mixing on their website (along with silence from Whirlwind), it will be impossible to repair any damage even of it were one person running the business who was unable to physically operate the mixer.
Regarding the $40,000 DAI, they were no obligation to leave that money in an escrow. I cannot understand why they would do it when other mixers using the forum did not deposit funds in that matter but please correct me if I am wrong. Scammers do not
usually behave that way. Why would they walk away from Whirlwind knowing they would lose the $40,000 DAI especially when it seemed as though Whirlwind was not profitable with it being a new mixer. Yes we can call it an exit-scam but there seems to be more to this than meets the eye.
The only valid excuse would be that this whole service is run by a single person, and that person is dead, in jail, hospital, or anything that stops him from physically operating the mixer, and that won't be any better than the whole service being a straight-out scam.
Even if they have temporarily lost access to everything, they could have created a new account on the forum and said something, this could be done using a mobile phone anywhere on the planet where they have internet, there is no excuse to
- Not show up on the forum for a month.
- Not Reply to any e-mails for weeks.
- Not Fix your service for weeks.
A 10-word post by a newbie account claiming to be affiliated with Whirlwind would make things seem a lot less scammy, but this silence leaves no questions.
So even if they come back with whatever excuse and compensate everyone, how would anyone trust them again? it's game over for Whirlwind, if they plan to do another scam or relaunch their "legit but terrible service", they would need to start fresh, using a different name, style, and everything.