I unfollowed Trevon a while back. Bitconnect never made any sense to me.
You made an interesting point about referrals to Coinbase. The thing about your example of referring people to Coinbase is that Coinbase doesn’t make any grandiose claims except to hold your USD and exchange it for crypto. All of the most reputable figures in the crypto space give Coinbase a restrained nod of approval as the stepping stone for US citizens to turn their fiat into crypto. At the same time, those same people also say that it’s not smart to leave your crypto on an exchange for very long. So if you referred someone to Coinbase it’s well known that centralized exchanges carry “caveat emptor” and you should be honest about the potential for losing money.
Bitconnect was different in that I don’t know of any reputable programmer, investor, business person etc. in the world of crypto that supported it. I could be wrong.
Trevon made Bitconnect a lot of money and I would say that if he made hundreds of thousands of dollars or more through promoting the platform, then he was a contractor for Bitconnect and should accept the consequences of his bad association with them.