RE: Arisebank | Raided by FBI and SEC | Interview of Jared Rice Sr.
AriseBank was only ever going to give BitShares a bad name by the fact that it was the association of BitShares' + Stan's name with this scam ICO that gave it a lot of it's apparent legitimacy - without it, I would presume a lot less people would have thrown away money to the known scammer behind this 'bank' ICO.
Imo, this affair means that I absolutely have zero trust in Stan, and I have a big question mark over BitShares due to their failure to publicly disassociate from AriseBank and state that Stan doesn't represent them in associating them with it. Which is unfortunate, as BitShares was one of the more promising projects in the space .... but this AriseBank scam is a huge huge red flag for all involved, which unfortunately includes BitShares.
I'm not going to dismiss your claims without thought, but I think everyone needs to wait and see what happens. If it truly is a scam we will all know. I am invested in Bitshares and that is why I know of AriseBank. I didn't even think of investing really because I was not interested in it, just interested in it benefiting Bitshares.
Well sure, it's fine for you to wait and see, if you're neither investing in nor promoting the AriseBank scam.
My insistence on calling it out for the clear scam that it is (which was easy enough to ascertain some time ago already, and now that it's disappeared completely from the web should be even more obvious), was to try to save people from losing their money with it, and to criticize those (e.g. Stan) who gave it legitimacy by promoting it unquestioningly and/or associating Bitshares'+their names with it, thus causing many more people to invest in it and be scammed out of their money. i.e. I did this in the hope that Stan and other promoters would disassociate from it and call it out for what it was - a scam. It is absolutely not fine, in the case of someone promoting it for example, to 'wait and see' whether it's a scam ....
At least, to me, there is a moral obligation to vet such a thing before promoting it (and it only took a few minutes of vetting to clearly see this for the fraud that it was, or at least to see way too many red flags to be able to in good conscience promote it), but unfortunately, it appears many in this space really have no morals or honesty, and are purely motivated by greed, and that Stan Larimer is no different to John McAfee selling-out to whoever pays him to dishonestly promote the week's current crypto-pump.