Maybe you can't call it a scam site, but it wasn't run honorably either.
Yeah, I don't know the details, but thought maybe you hadn't heard that there was more to the story than just "OP vanishes".
It's good you pointed me back to the thread. I hadn't heard anything about any payments back to people, but my attention had fallen away from that thread after months of nothing important happening. That's the fate of all these gambling-turned-scam-threads over the longterm, I'm afraid.