Edit: Monday 11th Jan, 2010. Shawn, a.k.a. VenomFangX has permanently removed his YouTube account. His parents and family are working with the YouTube users he slandered and issued illegal proceeding against to help him escape the young Earth creationism cult to which he has succumbed. Please see the follow-up article in the comments below.
Shawn would regularly post videos in which he claimed to present proof that various scientific methods of establishing facts are flawed because they don’t take into account the kind of biblical literalism preached by convicted fraudster and Creation Science Evangelism ministry founder, Kent Hovind.
Initially Shawn enabled comments and video replies to his clips, later removing ones which refuted his claims. Then he simply disabled comments and video replies altogether.
A few months ago, Shawn launched his own website which included a PayPal donate button. In his YouTube videos he began requesting money for sick children. YouTube user dprjones did some digging around and discovered that Shawn had posted a video (which was later removed) in which he appeared to say that the donations were also to be used for his car payments and tuition.
dprjones also found that by soliciting donations for charity, Shawn was breaking the law by failing to declare himself a registered charity, under Canadian law. dprjones reported Shawn’s activities to the charity he claimed to be raising money for and presumably the Canadian authorities.
Today we’re greeted with the most welcome news that VenomFangX’s YouTube account has been “Closed” (as opposed to ‘suspended’, suggesting VFX himself deleted the account) and that venomfangxsite.com has been taken off line, with a suspension notice suggesting that Shawn’s parents requested the site be closed down.
YouTube user FFreeThinker has posted a complete explanation of what VenomFangX has done to scam money from people:
Reddit user Aerik has also posted a thorough run down of events:
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/8ihzz/whoa_youtuber_venomfangxs_account_has_been_closed/c09e4lk
VenomFangArchive is a mirror of many of Shawn’s most hilarious moments—many of which were removed almost as soon as they were posted to the VenomFangX account.
Jezuzfreek77, long a supporter of VFX, offers an alternative explanation as to why Shawn’s YouTube account was removed.
EDIT: SuperFlyNB has re-posted VFX’s last video: