This guy made it into a moderator role this way, which is a good performance of this guy. Perhaps he even sought out to put in the effort to become one just so he could make more money this way, by purposefully abusing his reputation with complete disregard for the other people there.
Personally I find this psychology more interesting than the ones of his victims as this one psychology will, by its very nature, reveal the psychology of his victims at the same time.
His victims are probably feeling quite gutted by this revelation, but I'm not at all surprised that things like these exist in the retro computing world.
By sheer coincidence, I wrote this in a different thread just yesterday evening (or 2 days ago, apparently 🤣) which has a striking resemblance to what happened in that retro game community (no I didn't actually know this 🤣)
Tetrium wrote on 2022-06-01, 20:31:
With prices like this I would be surprised if there weren't already counterfeiters making fake collectibles, especially since collectors tend to not actually test their chips.
and these collectors apparently don't typically bother to test their games.
But I can somewhat relate to not wanting to test it, as it may potentially ruin their 'investment'.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised is at least some of the boxed still-in-the-original-foil games don't contain the really original foil anymore and have its content changed with a CD box with an empty CDR. Without opening the package (and depleting its collector value) it'll be very hard to verify its contents.