You are right in saying they were under no obligation, but my guess is, they used that as a reason to gain more trust, it was an important eliminate to compete the circle.

They/he/she had

1- A very smart person using the forum account
2- A lot of money spent on the review campaign
3- A lot of money spent on signature campaign

Very good tools to execute a scam, but to make things even better, you can just pretend that you don't even care about the 40k in escrow, it makes people think that you have way too much money to attempt a scam -- since you are spending tens of thousands of dollars on ads, left 40k in escrow when nobody asked you to, you must be sitting on a ton of money to scam my 0.01 BTC, so you are likely to be trusted.

Also, keep in mind, they did NOT risk those 40k, they were in safe hands, if the plan works fine and they get a lot more than 40k+whatever they spent, great, if not -- they could always get those 40k back, so it's not like the gambled with 40k and had a chance of losing them should things have not worked in their favor.


If anything would make me doubt that this was a scam plan from the get-go would be something like what @hugeblack mentioned above, a single person running this whole thing, and something bad happened to him, and it's game over. Again (nothing better than being a scam as far as everyone who lost funds is concerned), so ya, it's not the money they spent that makes me think this might have at least 5% of being a failure rather than a scam, it's the efforts and the intelligence of the person that could have otherwise been used into making a good mixer that would last for years and make a lot of profit.