Now I don't know german or the german sub-forum but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than a few germans scammed and filling complaints with "localbitcoins" named out of frustration.
100% correct; there was massive scamming going on (buying with stolen bank accts, man in the middle etc.) and there are enough complaints inside and outside their forum.
In essence, to receive a bank transfer within the specified time limit, sellers had to list the acct info in the ad - which is an excellent target for criminals, who can hack accounts and when successful, buy coins from such an ad.
Probably, German authorities were fed up with all that and have now pulled the plug.
I have recommended to LBC to do some sort of bank account verification like bitcoin.de or Paypal does, to ensure the buyer controls the account, or introduce escrow. Those two options would stop most scammers without requiring KYC (and after all, people paying with bank transfers are not anonymous at all).
LBC did give a fat rats ass and now the shit has hit the fan.
You can forget about putting the blame on bitcoin or localbitcoins for this one.
Hacked bank accounts and hacked credit cards is something entirely the fault of the police and the government, and they love producing shitty banking services and shitty credit cards that can be cloned so as to scare the peasants into socialising losses to hackers and as an excuse to have everyone earmarked for tax reasons, not even remotely for security reasons, that's why they keep trying to force reversibility of transactions, so that the taxman can look up an ebay seller's history nothing else, hacked accounts have been occuring for ages and what have the bankers done, nothing just keep producing the shitty cloneable cards and shitty atms etc etc. This is an attack on crypto make no mistake, but not all countries allow police to hide as secret police as they approach sellers.