It's not a scam. You just don't like the price. A scam would be if he took your money and did not deliver the promised account.

Your position would get stronger if you replaced scam with something like "scheme, plan, ploy" etc.

Further:

"Fraud is generally defined in the law as an intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact"

You can't prove intent. He has a plausible (but arguably dumb) explanation for not knowing that jives with the facts. He would walk on fraud charges.

In fact, he wouldn't even be indicted, or have a warrant issued, or arrested. So he wouldn't need to walk out of anywhere.

"Exposing a scam is not communism."

Attacking people for selling a service because someone else does it for free is basically some sort of weird Marxist whataboutism, so yeah, we're in Commie territory there.

"Although that pledge might seem noble, I have doubts about its honesty, in retrospect of his past actions."

This is a fair concern to have. I say we see if it's genuine. It would be like having a community witness, with the rewards going to help everyone indirectly.

Witness votes have no cooldown, after all, we can vote him out very quickly.

Would you feel better if he put some Steem into escrow to make good on this for the first few blocks/days/weeks?