You make some excellent points.
One of the most frustrating parts of this is when he first showed up requesting to be listed as a vendor here, I engaged in an extended conversation with him compared to most vendors because there had already been a few public problems stemming from his attempt to appear to be a Chinese vendor, trying to appear to be two different people, as well has his associations with various less-than-reputable characters in the "community". I took his explanations and representations at face value and told him as much, and decided to recognize him as a vendor. I still had my reservations but figured time would tell if he was going to change his ways or continue to be shady, and most of the time the community is pretty good at fleshing out the worst of the worst.
I've never understood why any vendor has to lower themselves to encouraging people to shill for them. As a number of other vendors have demonstrated over and over again, when you're good people are going to talk about you positively without any encouragement or incentive. However the moment you incentivize people in any way, both the perception and reality of honest reviews are completely destroyed. What's even more ironic is many of the biggest names in the business have had spectacular failures at some point, yet their responses were so well-executed that they usually manage to turn those failures into positives. In the end, the guy may be an "ok" drug dealer, but he's clearly not a very good businessman.
It's frustrating for me to have to deal with it at all. I enjoy seeing new members join and participate, but sadly I have had to dedicate so much time to dealing with all the shitty humans (well beyond this one person/company) that I don't get to engage with them nearly as much as I would like to.
Perhaps the most poignant irony to this all is since retiring and having more time to spend here, for the most part I've had little interest in reading or learning about what kind of vendor drama has been going on during my absence and had no clue what was going on with scamsite beyond knowing a couple of threads were pretty active. I was happy to leave it all to the community to figure out; that was until the floodgates of shills opened up.