I represent a group that was collectively scammed for over 100000 BTC by Trendon Shavers of Texas, USA.  Are you familiar with the case?

There are dozens and dozens of threads here on these forums about him and many elsewhere on the Internet, just Google "Trendon Shavers".

IIRC he already has a default judgement against him by the SEC for $143 million (he ignored the SEC certified mail and did not appear).

Trouble is, since he was running a Ponzi, he claims there is no money or BTC left - it was used to pay the interest to those that did get out with a profit.

Interest?  Is this the kind of thing you are looking for?

Well mine shows:

CN = www.bitcointalk.org
OU = Domain Control Validated - RapidSSL(R)
OU = See www.rapidssl.com/resources/cps (c)13
OU = GT09728370
Serial Number = JTwTMeXvVHcrA/jnpRfih/8SESWljFo1

Public Key:

30 82 01 0a 02 82 01 01 00 d6 32 2f da a0 42 6e 6f 3b de 14 d0 bd 1a d6 31 08 a2 da 3b f7 f8 be 9d bc cc c9 98 87 a0 46 af bf 00 08 fd 10 50 48 d8 64 a5 b5 ba e1 7e ca 05 71 1b f8 4d 47 50 71 d7 60 f0 65 7f bf ca f3 af 96 70 f0 eb 3b c3 7e 40 13 6b 55 4d 50 b4 72 f7 33 1b f4 51 a2 0a 9b e2 fd 64 3c 1d bb d6 76 8b 00 61 77 4a 43 11 b9 04 a2 d5 d0 79 47 0a e5 05 f6 b6 46 16 90 2a c3 76 c4 18 aa 5f 52 62 7b ba ec f5 1e 93 ec 4d 6f b3 8f 90 bd 32 ed 4f 54 32 8a c6 99 1f 55 18 b2 e1 3c ba b7 e9 3a 1f 94 c5 f7 91 bd f3 e2 9b 9f 11 e0 4c ad db f7 bf 21 04 76 0f 8b 04 a3 66 c4 f8 55 25 57 7a 73 20 04 87 99 75 7b b2 7e 0b f9 ca 65 f6 87 3c 66 7d a2 a7 6c fa 26 41 92 43 03 40 0d 13 61 64 21 4f c6 06 a4 2d b6 35 e6 c9 9b 6a fa a0 4f 66 db 04 b1 1e 1a 99 3a dc dd e4 77 d1 c4 fc c7 49 e3 f6 0f bf 02 03 01 00 01

DNS Name=www.bitcointalk.org
DNS Name=bitcointalk.org

BUT when I log on I am getting:

www.bitcointalk.org

Fingerprint:  29 0e cc 82 2b 3c ce 0a 73 94 35 a0 26 15 ec d3 eb 1f 46 6b

Dates:  10/5/2013 to 8/5/2014

Yep, that is him.

http://www.justmugshots.com/texas/collin-county/18816833

He has put on some weight though.

You have a signed contract with Trendon?  You are one of the few then.

Spelling corrected.  Thanks fellow -PR!

PPT-PR represents the interests, opinions, information repository and anger of several of the PPT operators.  Collectively we lost tens of thousands of BTC principal and it is here so we can contribute when we can.  PH is not directly involved but several of the PPT operators do know him and talk to him from time to time.

Yes.  It does.

So you claim you made a profit on the secondary market?

Note to self:  include yochdog's profit in SEC investigation...

Go get him!  We are right behind you.  We will give you half of whatever coins you recover for us!

You get to pay for everything up front with no actual BTC help from anyone!

If, after you time and expenses, you get nothing - your loss.

Deal?

+1

This is exactly what happened when we tried to take up a collection to go after Trendon.  Everyone contacted was more than happy to pay half of all BTC collected back to the lawyers but not one single person involved was willing to put in any money up front.  The reasons are obvious.  The chance of getting anything back is almost zero.  Any money put in up front to pay lawyers would be just more money down the drain.  Many of the people involved were wiped out by the scam so even if they did want to gamble on getting something back they really do not have anything left to gamble with.


Would you be willing to put in money up front to pay for this?  As you said it would be a donation because there is almost no chance of getting anything back.

Trendon, is this one of the threads you monitor when you log in you fucking asshole?


Post some shit the next time you log in you yellow coward.

I think the joke was more a reference to the fact that Tom/Cablepair/bASIC supposedly sold his ASIC company today to a yet to be identified "Asian company".

If you lose a ton of money to a con man and you believe that by spending more (lawyers, investigators, time, etc.) you have a fair chance of getting more than the additional amount back from the con man, then you do it.

However, if you believe the chance of getting anything back is almost zero then you do not spend the additional resources.

It is as simple as that.

Can anyone see a clear path to get anything back from him? 

Take as an example the supposed safety deposit box.  Assume you somehow do get the authorities to act and confiscate it.  We do not get it back.  It is confiscated and then maybe, someday, way out in the future, you might see a small portion of it returned to you - a very big maybe.

I personally and we (the PPT operators) collectively have lost a fortune to this guy, would like to get it back, but so far we see no way to get any of it back.

Assuming that BangkokGuy is not Trendon then the whole thing could be true.  Trendon told the story to the bar, a lot of it is true, but in true drunk/storytelling mode he embellished the story with a few pounds of bullshit (Swiss bank etc.) to make it more entertaining.  With that in mind I can believe that BangkokGuy may have met him.  That was a while back so it does not help us much now.  I sure wish Goat could have made it to the bar when he was there.

It does sound a lot like him (drunk, cocky, lots of information, bragging, living it up, buying rounds, etc.) but it is equally likely BangkokGuy is him just trolling us for fun (he did his share when he was around).

This.  Recently I did a poll of several of the PPT operators and some of their larger customers and there was not one single person willing to put in one additional bitcent of new money toward recovery.  Almost all of them replied that they would happily pay a percentage of whatever is recovered to whoever recovers it.

The thinking is that there is really no way to recover whatever is left anyway so why throw good money after bad.

What does anyone have, really, in the way of proof of debt or contract?  A typical direct customer or PPT operator has two Bitcoins addresses:  a deposit address and a withdrawal address.  The difference between the two amounts is the "amount owed" (writing off all the bogus interest accumulated).

Now two somewhat arbitrary Bitcoin addresses, and the difference between them does not constitute much of a contract or collectible debt in the real world.

I sure wish that the moment you thought he was in Bangkok you would have contacted Goat, who is one of the few people to have met him in person, so that he could go to the bar in question, verify it was him, and kick his ass.

Could someone please re-post the SEC contact info here again so we don't have to go looking for it?

I speak on behalf of the trust accounts and "PPT operators"  (of which there are a few different types).  Not one of the trust accounts or "PPTs" that I am in contact with made any BTC and most lost more than you can imagine.  As I stated above some of the larger trust account holders - who lost the most - have contacted the SEC and are going down that path as it appears to be the most promising at this point.

But as I also stated:  at the end of the day what do we really have that can be used against Trendon?  Not much.

From actual experience I would say that less than half the customers reinvested and more than half of them took their interest every three days in the early days, then weekly when the system was changed.

I describe a method by which this "reinvestment rate" can be estimated from the information we have on Bitcoinmax here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120119.msg1331862#msg1331862

From here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83904.msg1302303#msg1302303

We can see that the amount on deposit at Bitcoinmax at the time of closure was: 167728.74239044 + 110.74501165, this includes all interest to that date.

Now someone can dig up their deposit and withdrawal addresses and we can calculate exactly how much was actually on depost.