This reminds me of the collapes of Tate Publishing a few years back. Somewhat surprisingly, the original blog post (that I read closely at the time) is still “live” without having to resort to archive.org. In the over 300 comments there is a mix of people who realized that they were scammed by Tate and people refusing to accept it. It is a fascinating read:
https://accrispin.blogspot.com/2016/06/tate-publishing-enterprises-slapped.html?m=1o
(And I just remembered that I posted a thread about it at the time.)