The problem with assessing the success rate of the VAN predictions lies in the way that they were made. If you look at a table of predictions and results, it looks not bad. What you don't see is that the earlier predictions were not released publicly at the time they were made. The predictions were made on telegrams (for the date stamp) sent by the VAN team to each other, which were then made public later. This caused other seismologists to ask (from the early 1980s onwards) "How many other telegrams were sent and quietly burned?". A more open approach by VAN at the outset would have avoided a lot of the distrust.

Presently VAN is in the doghouse in Greece because (a) they didn't predict the Athens earthquake last year, and (b) they did predict a second Athens event which never happened, but the prediction caused a big panic. Now I hear tell that there is some investigation into financial irregularities in the VAN funding, but I don't have the details.