Well hell, I don't think anyone in the SkitB thread contacted them. They did contact the FBI and that went nowhere.

People including myself did relay the secret service information from here to some of the victims on the arcade-museum forums so it's likely that at least one of them went down that route. Then again Steven started doing partial payouts around that time so maybe they just took what they could get and dropped it.

I contacted the admin of that website that details the whole scam and he mentioned that nobody really contacted the SS as far as he knew. I think Steven started making "restitution" simply due to the local police knocking on his door, according to the website. If that's true, I imagine he might have actually made things right across the board if the SS were to have payed him a visit.

Why would the secret service be involved in this at all?

https://www.secretservice.gov/investigation

The U.S. Secret Service has a long and storied history of safeguarding America’s financial and payment systems from criminal exploitation. The agency was created in 1865 to combat the rise of counterfeit currency following the Civil War. As the U.S. financial system has evolved - from paper currency to plastic credit cards to, now, digital information - so too have our investigative responsibilities.

Today, Secret Service agents, professionals, and specialists work in field offices around the world to fight the 21st century’s financial crimes, which are increasingly conducted through cyberspace. These investigations continue to address counterfeit, which still undermines confidence in the U.S. dollar, but it is credit card fraud, wire and bank fraud, computer network breaches, ransomware, and other cyber-enabled financial crimes, that have become the focus of much of the Secret Service investigative work.

Thanks!!

I listened to the podcast. It's actually a pretty good podcast in general but there wasn't much new info about the scam other than that a detective was involved which I don't remember reading before.

Also the guy who was on who was scammed said that Steve was giving him the runaround saying the games were damaged so he reached out to Kris and all of a sudden Steve contacted him offering to send him one of the games.

He also said law enforcement had zero interest in looking into this.

bump for updates

Was bored and remembered this scam so I caught up on the last 5 months...

Unfortunately there really has been no progress at all.

Someone confirmed that the police acknowledged he committed several crimes but have no interest in pursuing it.

Then someone with a legal background came in and explained that in this kind of situation requires time and time is money. They said the best chance was for a bunch of victims to start a class action so they can pool together resources for a lawyer and hope to get the attention of law enforcement. Even then they shouldn't expect to get their money back, it would be more about making the scammer's life hard and help prevent future scams.

His advice sounded really good until one of the more vocal victims, Odin, came in to explain that multiple lawyers had already been hired and they already confirmed the only assets under his name are a shit house and an old truck. Apparently the scammer has some sort of trust fund too but they were told it was untouchable.

Also it sounds like the scammer has started to make restitution with most victims. Only one or two appear to have been made 100% whole again but the rest have been made partially whole which means they are far less likely to pursue expensive legal solutions.

All done last year. I don't know if the guys who filed the suits and hired the attorneys stopped paying when it dead ended, or if they just couldn't get anywhere. I haven't talked to the main guy who hired the lawyer since last year. A lot (most) of the victims declined to participate in the lawyer fees because they just wanted to be over the whole thing and not put any more money into it.

Steven doesn't have any assets, he rented the shithole warehouse. His only assets on paper are a shithole old shack of a house that's not worth anything, and an old pickup truck. We have Steven's criminal records, almost 100 arrests/citations. Been in prison. Has nothing to take, lives on a trust fund that is certainly immune to a lawsuit over this.

I know everyone has ideas of what should have been done, and I'm saying we did it all. And that's precisely why, after months of wasting energy fighting Steven, pretty much everyone made a deal to take cash and/or games of a similar (but always lesser) value to the original purchase. Everyone saw enough evidence to know that Steven would NEVER be paying anyone back if they went legal. Our only chance of ever getting anything was to make the best deal we could, and as far as I know all but 1 person in our group was made mostly whole. And by that I mean we got money and/or games of approximate value of the original deal, only Steven always came out a little ahead on the deals. He basically got a 6 month interest free loan from us and then only had to pay back 75% of it because he sent out less desirable games.

People are still trying to chase him and Kris around the various forums calling them out for being scammers. It's apparently working to a degree since Steve has claimed to file a defamation suit for libel

https://www.stevensalmonisascammer.com/updates

Sounds like it's 99% confirmed Kris Donohoo is also involved in the scam since he's still selling games that were involved in the fire supposedly and never went out.
Someone also said Kris will wait on approving sale posts in groups he controls and then go sell the item in another group at a markup before approving the ad and buy it himself. Someone posted PMs from Kris admitting he is selling the same games that were used in the scam, sometimes to the very same victims of the original scam.

criminals knowing how to stay under the radar. Those types keep everything off the record for this same kind of reason... makes them undesirable to target. Then they just keep grinding believing they are untouchable.

Only answer is street justice unfortunately.

100% correct

Yup.