Topic: Alpha Technology Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner Order Batch 1 Now! - page 150. (Read 529096 times)

Good advice.

We need someone in the UK to talk to a lawyer and no need to donate, we will engage in a no-win no-fee agreement. The lawyer would know if it is legal to engage in such agreement in the UK (in some countries it is not, he must set a fee).

Then I would gladly agree to a 25% fee off the refund to the lawyer.

So easy process:

1. Someone in the UK proposes a lawyer.
1. Someone(s) else does as well
2. The names of the legal firms are presented, we all agree on one after each one of us contacting them confirming existence, name, history, expertise in subject matter etc.
3. The person who nominated the selected company makes contact and comes back with proposal
4. We agree to the proposal and each one contacts the lawyer cc admin@ or contactus@ of the firm giving the details of the order
5. The Lawyer creates a BCC list and communicates action plan

 Folks.. There has been some great advice, and I for one appreciate it. But it takes more than advice. We need someone who is well versed and trained in the uk laws that can get with whatever agency's to correct this. I for one would more than willingly give or donate to any charity or person money equivalent to 20% of the money spent to whoever could achieve this. I have almost $6.5k invested.

 Scrap'

To that e-mail, I would reply with citation of other items they have stated but not followed thru on in their 'news releases', including project completion by the 15th, weekly updates, etc.  If they are going to consider their news items contractual terms, then what about the other terms they are violating?

Also, make clear you are a consumer, have no business license, and have not at anytime acting as a business.  That's a fradulent claim on Alpha-t's part, but if you don't disgaree you're accepting their terms.

Their "hardware" can be used for personal experimenation too, no?  What if you are a hobby developer that wanted a scrypt miner for other purposes then mining Litecoin?  Sounds like consumer activity to me

(Just my opinion, of course.  Certainly not legal advice.)

Alpha will not refund anything - see this:

Me:
Hello Alpha,
>
> I’ve cancelled my order and want my money back. Here are the rules
> you put on the web, It’s also screenshoted on many forums:
>
here is screenshot of https://alpha-t.net/terms-order/ where is not any word about 5 month and after that nothing is refunded
> Cancellation & Refund Policy
>
> You may cancel your order at any time before shipment. Once the
> equipment has been shipped, it is no longer to possible to cancel your
> order and/or request a refund. Should you encounter a problem with
> your product, please see the warranty section for more information
> regarding warranty on our products.
>
> Should you cancel your order, you agree that we are allowed to charge
> you with a £70 GBP administrative fee. We will deduct the
> administrative fee from the amount due to be refunded to you in
> accordance with the terms above before we process the refund. We may
> also deduct transaction fees from the to be refunded amount in the
> event that your payment method or credit card issuer does not support
> refunds, thereby forcing us to refund you in another manner.
>
> So I’m expecting 1565,- £ coming to my bank account.
>
> Please note me within one week when I can expect my money , thank you.
> Just one important information – my order number is xxxxx
> Maybe just one more:
> I am not a business customer because i dont have a company
> registration number, I dont have a tax number, I even wasnt asked for
> that kind of information at the moment i placed my order, a placement
> of an order on your website doesnt turn me into a business customer,
> im still an individual.

And their reply:
Hello there,

We are very sorry but as per our cancellation policy it has been longer
than 5 months since you placed your order therefore you are no longer
eligible for a refund. We have been very clear and open with our terms
of order, it was released as a news update, it is easily available on
our website and you are urged to view it on the product page before you
order. Such regulations only apply to consumers and you are a business
customer with us. I can assure you that our legal matters are dealt with
by a leading law firm in the UK. Our terms of order are completely legal
in the UK. It was typed up by solicitors who specialize in this area of
law. They have advised us that all our customers will be legally classed
as businesses for many reasons, one being that the hardware we are
selling can only be used for mining cryptocurrencies which is a business
practice according to HMRC.

Best Regards,

Alpha Technology Team


...So, what now? What can I do? I'm not in UK, but Czech republic. What dou you suggest?

''
Ask Us Anything! / Re: Final Payment Date?
« on: Today at 04:32:40 PM »
Quote from: 4imble on Today at 02:53:07 PM

    When is the current date for final payment?

    I have had problems with payza and so waited for CC processing, but that was not working either.
    I am also in the same boat as others and worrying about the lack of an update and would prefer to hold off until then.

    So again, i was wondering when is the latest i can make my final payment?


Technically the due date was 2 weeks after we asked for final payment however rest assured we will give you sufficient time to pay.''

Fiat reply today

They prefer to lose orders, receive claims for refunds, being called scammers than state the truth. Yeah....so what could it be?  

That bold text is what I've brought up before. They can't explain the why, or refuse to, and that should concern everyone. They at least could BS in the past with tapeout reasons, but they know they can't do that anymore without showing their panties.

The fact is, Alpha-T know exactly what the situation is, and aren't telling anyone.

They won't even tell you why there's a delay. No news is bad news, IMHO.

Deeper into the dodo … a family's plea to Fiaz from the Alpha-T forum https://forum.alpha-t.net/index.php?topic=770.25 (Screen shots of a working unit)


If The all Sovereign can't get an update out of Fiaz, nothing can ...

(Note: republished in part under the Fair Use Doctrine as a matter of public interest)

Jrose120,
Interesting analysis of the situation.   Whether you are wrong or right, one thing is for certain... Alpha is hiding something.

This is not gonna happen. Within 3 months + some hope™ factor time they will be able to buy 50 & 250 MH rigs from other manufacturers for the fraction of the amounts people entrusted them. Monkey business.

A great site indeed.  I have definitely saved a ton of snapshots from archive.org to go with my own snapshots of various pages before they were changed.

The ONE good thing about Alpha-T, is that they have put themselves out there.  Pictures of the company's employees as well as the management's other businesses are plastered around the web.  If it all goes to shit over the next 2 weeks, there will certainly be hell to pay.

It's a small world... you can run, but you can't hide.

---

So, Alpha-T, ban us from your forums; run scared.  It's not going to help you if you don't produce what you have promised - and time is running out.

For those who don't know about the Internet Archive you should check it out. https://archive.org/web/

I find it interesting that this domain used to belong to a private investigation firm based in Asia. You can see those web pages too, just go back to 2004-2005. The irony is kind of uncanny.

This website, The Way Back Machine, doesn't update every time Alpha-T updates their web pages, it's just how often their archive bot crawled the pages.
The site caches the entire World Wide Web  and saves it for public access. Maybe you can find some pages to use as evidence in your upcoming court battle. You can also get a good laugh by going back to see what big name websites used to look like in the late 1990’s. Looks childish compared to today. I digress...

I started Scrypt mining in early December of 2013. I personally leveraged the hill using my credit cards to put together a 75Mh/s GPU farm. I spent about $70k setting things up. I ran it for 6 months and pulled in about $70k worth of BTC that was converted to fiat as quickly as it was coming in. The farm was liquidated for $20k when I literally pulled the plug about 2 months ago. Total gain at best was $20k for 6 months of hard work. I consider myself lucky, it could have turned out so much worse.  I was so close to buying into Alpha-T, a couple of my friends went in deep. They are in the same county and are running a 90Mhs GPU farm; they put money down for at least 10 of their (at the time) 25Mh/s units. Last I heard they found a deep pocketed investor who put in even more money when the faster speeds and (the convenient) openings for Batch 1 were announced. I'm sure they are way more than $100k in the hole for deposits, forget about paying off the balance.

I would have put money in for sure if I wasn’t already maxed out on every credit line I could get a hold of. For that reason and that reason alone I’m sitting on the side lines watching this play out.

I know how devastating this may be for most of you. I really feel like there are two camps here. Those that have accepted the truth and those that refuse to. It's been interesting reading all of these posts. I wonder how many of these user accounts are controlled by Alpha-T? Some of their supporters will blindly follow them over a cliff, others need to believe in them because the truth is to painful to accept. Those people unwittingly help keep this ball rolling by finding any thing that they can latch on to to show that good people like themselves aren’t victims, It’s the company’s fault for slow shipping, delays in manufacturing, etc. etc. etc...

Folks, there is nothing coming to show for your hard earned money except for a flood of emotions to process before you can see things clearly for what they really are.

I'm here to tell you that Alpha-T is in big trouble. At best they had good intentions but they've strayed from the morally correct path and have gone to the dark side folks. Your money is paying for their homes, cars, fancy dinners, vacations, etc... They are going to dodge and delay until they are checkmated. It will be years before any of them are sent to prison. They are too busy covering their tracks and putting together their defense to ever worry about getting their company back on track. The company is a loss, and it's clear they've cut that loss with the current attitude towards their customers. Why should they be nice and forthcoming? They have no product to sell and If they don't stop taking payments they have no hope of avoiding criminal indictments.

This is what I think happened, in roughly this order as well:

- A couple of accountants decided that they were going to lead the charge to develop custom hardware for Scrypt mining. Knowing they have no experience but decide they’ll figure it out on the fly. Dollar signs are dancing in their heads as they see easy money for the taking due to the arms race for the fastest mining hardware. Knowing this is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of pre-orders, watching how other companies had gotten away with it during the BTC ASIC arms race. The plan became more about how to get those dollars than making miners. 

- They hire an IT guy to help get things going. This person is not qualified for the task but gives it his best because of the promise of a big paycheck. (they needed a large staff, not a guy)

- They announce their GPGPU as their plan, then change their minds. Their first plan was to essentially build custom PCI-E graphics cards loaded up with multiple GPU chips.

- Then they announce they can do better, and ditch the GPGPU design and will now make actual ASIC chips, not heavy duty GPGPUs.

- They establish a relationship with Drexel against Drexel’s better judgment. They too are seeing $$$ signs and don’t want to leave it on the table. Drexel agrees to work with them and goes as far as posting a vague official announcement on Drexel’s website. Probably at the request of Alpha-T, and possibly contingent upon their future working relationship.

- Without any thing to show accept for a lot of lofty promises, and an announcement on Drexel’s web site, the money starts rolling in faster than they dreamed.

- They again announce they can do better and change their plans. This pattern is repeated several more times. They keep announcing changes or improvements to essentially a non existing product. The community rallies behind them and even the most skeptical start to think that maybe this is for real. 

- For a moment it appears that a couple of accountants might actually be able to deliver on their grandiose plans to change the landscape of GPU mining literally overnight. .

- Drexel finds it difficult to work with Alpha-T because they have no experience, don’t understand the industry speak, or the pitfalls of trying to go run before you crawl. The constant changes throw the timeline completely off track. They probably started butting heads with Drexel because they are taking short cuts. Drexel is telling them to, measure twice cut once. They continue to take short cuts and when it doesn’t work they blame Drexel. Drexel realizes they are dealing with a bunch of unprofessional clowns and sees the writing on the wall. Drexel ends their relationship with Alpha-T  for breach of contract. They remove all traces of Alpha-T from their website. Any product that was made is now tied up in litigation. Alpha-T either can’t pay the bill for the chips, or the chips don’t work and Alpha-T refuses to bite the bullet and eat the loss so that a new batch can be put into production. I’m guessing there are some big egos at Alpha-T, they can’t take constructive criticism, or accept responsibility for anything. It’s always some one else’s fault.

- Alpha-T starts to implode from the inside out. There is no one left to run the ship. Anyone with half a brain sees this as a toxic mess. Instead of focusing on making mining rigs Alpha-T goes into full damage control mode. Clever payment schemes, by making customers wait beyond the chargeback date, switching payment processors and closing out accounts to ensure the money only flows one way, in not out.

- At this stage Alpha-T is probably no more than just the Akram brothers. Falling back on the one thing they actually can do, accounting work, your money is being moved around like it’s a shell game. They will ensure it will take years to unravel the threads and prove criminal intent.

- Alpha-T is written off as a loss in the minds of the Akram brothers. They no longer provide meaningful updates, refunds, real customer support, or anything else that a company must have in order to survive. They know it’s over, do you?

I'd love to be wrong here, but the writing is on the wall for those who care to read it. Think about it folks, they can't produce any picture of anything. Not even a partially assembled prototype missing the key component, the chips. I can't understand why they don't at least try and give us a picture. It would buy them more time and give hope to those who refuse to believe they've been scammed. We would see that they are actually using your money to attempt to make a product. No photo, no product = no good!

What’s left to do at this point? I know many of you want your mining rigs, it’s too late to expect the mining rig to pay for itself. If you put down anymore money that would increase your losses, even if you ran the hardware for a year. Remember you can’t go by today’s numbers to make your ROI calculations. By the time the machines ship out and are turned on the combined added hash rate will cause the difficulty to sky rocket. If the prices hold stable but the difficulty triples by the time you get your mining rig online, is there any hope of it ever paying itself off?

I know there will be some people who agree and others who disagree with my opinions. Either way, I hope these bastards don’t get away with this. I’d love for nothing more than to see all of these mining rigs ship out. However the chances of that happening are slim to none – and slim just left the building.

It's pretty "awesome" to see how UkAlpha's twitter posts are farther and farther apart as time progresses.

Timeline:

https://twitter.com/UkAlpha

Interesting how chips capacity / power usage changed trough the time.

And the GEM - first delivery indication (they were convinced FPGA would do the job I believe):

Alpha Technology @UkAlpha  ·  Oct 24
We are ~2 months from product launch. Testing and verifying at the moment.

Any predictions for the week?

My bet:
- Fiaz says "Soon" at least 4 times.
- The Doctor posts more "opinions," even though he's a contractor that repeatedly says he can't speak for Alpha-T.
- No real news...

But hey, maybe we'll be presently surprised? (hahaha... ya...)

er did they then 'ban him?"

Searing (can't tell banned from alpha forums...)

They stated very clearly in their last e-mail about CC processing that they were waiting for chips from the foundary.  Now, if that is the first batch of chips, or if those chips were faulty and they needed to order a second batch, is anyone's guess.

You can't reason with someone who is unreasonable or incapable of suffering logic. It's in their email blasts from 2013, on up through March, at which point they got really sketchy about timelines, details, prototypes, even pictures.

They had pictures of the controller board. Then it disappeared, and said they had to work on the design more (despite it being finished?).

Maybe the answer lies in the tapeout news. Around the same time they claimed they would have their chips shipped to them (end of May) is around the time Drexcel cut ties with them on the internet. Could this mean that they did indeed send the chips and wanted to wash their hands of the deal? In which case, what's going on with Alpha? Maybe they do have some gear and are working on the 2-12 week process of getting it certified.

All speculation, and that's thanks to their 100% transparency promise of providing detailed information, where they've done nothing but used smoke and mirrors, and proper grammar in emails.