Clearly he is a d-bag and knows nothing about running a business. As others have touched on, he was not properly funded to start up this business. His history seems to indicate he is a con man more than a business man.
In traditional businesses you pay your employees first. You don't pay your mortgage, you don't pay your vendors, you don't pay your landlord, you pay your employees first. Without your employees and their confidence in you, you might as well shut down.
With an Affiliate Network, you have your employees, but you also have your affiliates. They both need to be paid first. Before he has his wife get a pedicure, before he gets his oil changed, before he buys his next freaking meal.. paid paid and paid. Before he pays a light bill, before he buys another pencil, paid paid and paid.
I can guarantee you this guy had a whole list of things he paid for before he dropped a dollar back to dollar. The evidence is in... and he is only going to make it harder for the next guy.
That being said, I don't think I have ever signed up with a network and done any serious traffic before establishing a relationship and/or getting history.
I find it hard to believe that these guys had some kind of exclusive offer or massive increased pay-out... so it probably was a completely unnecessary risk.
I hope whomever is owed money by CPARev gets paid sooner rather than later... but I really think it needs to be made sure they are doing as a business, because this kind of behavior is just not acceptable.
Even if they guy totally screwed up, which he did, had no idea what he was doing, which he didn't, he could have at least had a chance if he would have dealt with people honestly. Instead he lied over and over and over again, which makes it pretty clear his whole intention was to rip people off from the get go.
How can he be waiting on future revenue? Who is driving traffic to a network where you can not contact anyone?
If anyone has a list of offers they were running, it wouldn't hurt to contact advertisers either and let them know what is up. Advertisers don't want to be working with networks who don't pay up any more than networks want to work with advertisers who don't pay up.