They also claimed they had a legit charity behind them and everything looked innocent for this reason.
Remember though Planty had a rep, there were so many willing to help him who had a high profile that even people who had suspicions, such as myself, had to comply. There was so much pressure and good vibes at the time to support a new and upcoming vocaloid developer, Planty, that people were caught up in this. Never mind how he could get away with making a Japanese Vocalodi and 3 voicebanks when "he couldn't afford to release her".
At the same time, he was involved with another project, Jewel, and he not only took Stella with him but impacted Jewel and her creators had to change things. He also tried to take out others with him by claiming he had a Vocaloid Dev kit from someone else. Everything was a lie and she was simply a XSY by product, which meant he couldn't publish any of his work, let alone claim any money from his albums. XSY was a lot tighter then and less options were given for the characters, so there wasn't one song using the 3 combinations that was able to be used. Bare in mind publishing work on youtube is still publishing work...
When he was finally found out, he revealed he was purposely trying to trick everyone and knew what he was doing was wrong.
Nowadays, Stella is associated with all of this and so many were hurt or angered by this that she is scorned for reappearing.
To this day, knowing he was a immoral Vocaloid producer before all of this happened still surprises me that it was able to happen. He was know to Pocaloid, to have distributed the knowledge on Anon and Kanon's secret trial version, things like this. He broke into the files for Vocaloids and even passed Azuki and Matcha's V2 lite versions on and how to get them into V3. There was so much shady dealings going on with him that by all means, he truly shouldn't have gotten this far.
I think a lot of it was he spread information people didn't know, and the guys generally at places like VO forums aren't against nor for the use of illegal vocaloid, they just can't be seen to support it. Whereas in contrast, we're forced to obey rules that prevent us from supporting it at all and we have to be sparkling clean to the point of stupidity at times. But to the forum goers at VO, I guess he wasn't anything special, there was guys after all who did what he did so they never really had a reason to think too far ill of him. With the new release of V4 as well, there was basically a lot of mystery about the future as there had been with V3's release, so the timing of Stella may have also played a part in this. :-?
Edit:
@IP 72.76.60.158, If its for private use you don't have to ask at all. The only issue with Japanese studios is... Japanese.
However, I would not even think to revive or bring up Stella at all, as there was too much hatred surrounding her that bringing her up publically will cause hassle. Your best drawing a line on Stella and not referencing her in any way. either come up with a new character or just don't feature one at all.
And if you read our page on the Cross-Synthesis, you can read why XSY between characters isn't always so brilliant and even among the AHS and Internet co groups... Vocaloids weren't made for XSY among each other and it can lead to some awful results. It is a concern about XSY that's been around since it was introduced.
That's all pretty much I'll say on XSY between Rana and Kokone... And since the two are very different to each other, Kokone will likely cause Rana to warp her sound quite badly.