It's astonishing that financially minded people, used to doing due diligence for potential investments in their day jobs, would trust a company with their own personal money without digging into its founder's backstory!
Most (all?) of that material was in French, which seems to have been a surprisingly effective barrier. (French proficiency is not terribly common in the US or Japan; and how many people are so paranoid about random counterparties that they will hire translators to go through everything any of the counterparties have ever written looking for red flags? Have you ever done that?)
I don't recall even the Mtgox haters bringing up any of the French backstory until not long before the end.
