Look at this forum. Count the number of times publicly active figures, that have known locations have scammed millions and hundreds of millions of dollars and lied to thousands of clients. They don't live in your country. They are still alive and going about their business. (except pirate@40 because he was highly idiotic, but still alive)

Look outside this forum. People have scammed and stolen millions of dollars of property. Some are in prison, some are not, but nobody died and they didn't care much while scamming. They don't live in your country.

Here's an example of someone that is in top 300 richest people in the country that got 10 years in prison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Voiculescu. Fortune estimated at 1.5 - 1.6 billion euros. Confiscated: 60 million euros. He stole billions of euros from people and the state and the state gets back just 60 million.

I see this concept of "public figure = trust rating over 9000" is valid for americans. They feel that if someone can be found, they can be sued and punished, so they wouldn't think about wrong-doing. Not all people are normal. So I don't agree with this line of thought.

There needs to be technical proof, both of their honesty and their technical performance. I don't call anyone a scammer unless proven, as I said, bitcoin-trader.biz can be a perfectly legitimate honest operation based on public information.