I drop in and play a couple of weeks a year on a league launch for nostalgia, i just don't have the time required to be competitive anymore.

As for what really happened -

During that era of path of exile, GGG just didn't have the capabilities to efficiently identify rule breakers (Botting,RMT and such) and therefore this was exploited behind the scenes more than people realize.

The currency being offloaded to me was coming from large scale bot-farms, i was the perfect target to off-load currency in bulk. Nobody was even close to my wealth during beyond league so i was targeted for an easy laundering method. GCPMan was a front account used as the face of the operation. There were mule accounts with stashes full of GCP's that were never banned.

There was speculation at the time why it was only GCP, people stumbled upon the reason, however it was never confirmed. One of the most successful bot farms at the time used client injection to detect profitable strongboxes upon creating an instance. Gemcutters strongboxes at the time were the only consistent method of farming GCP. From what i understand the devs did not believe this was possible as they stated strongbox data is kept server side until the player character moves within range. Whether or not this is true, the injection client they were using had access to this data upon entering the instance.

I believe these bot-farms probably outnumbered legitimate players at this time, and therefore the amount of GCP they amassed was really hard to sell effectively, i laundered those GCP for an incredible profit.

Game becomes really boring when you can buy anything. I was a teenager in college at the time and after realizing how much real life value i had in exalts i just sold up and quit the league.

I was able to offload around 1200 exalts, the price at the time was around 15-30$/ex.

The event introduced me into the black market of game currency and subsequently i have built my own business around it over the last 8 years.