if thousands of gears wen't offline, the gears owners should have known right after the gears were unplugged ! , it takes a lot of time dealing with the transfer of that large number of miners.
but reading further down, it seems like MinedMap claim the miners were never plugged in , if that's the case why continue sending them money for electricity bills??
Yeah somewhere in there it says they couldn't even host 200 Miners June/2018. So it's believable that the majority never did get plugged in. It's hard to figure out if any of the companies saw their gear get turned on. So it would be interesting to see what the sell was or if the due diligence was lacking. Maybe they sold the facility under the guise of an immediate or pending upgrade. Pay up front to secure revenue and we'll have you online in a few months, with a deal on power cost. I could see the appeal in this, and some of the conversations allude to this sort of agreement.
The payments themselves were made in September, and suggest they expected the miners online within weeks I would imagine. It's a large chunk of money to tie up otherwise. Again I think it comes down to due diligence in spending a few dollars on flights to investigate your investment.
my guess is that Northway lied about their ability of hosting that many miners, and they took them else were, but still if they were else where up and running, MinedMap would never go this far.
there is something missing here, and i think the most important question is the one you pointed out...
That is one of the theories that they are hosted somewhere. Northway had a lot of "projects" on the go there is talk in the article about a supposed build in Louisiana that never got off the ground either. I think there is a lot missing and I'm going to try and pay attention to anything that comes out for this. It's a weird large scale scam, and I'm amazed it got this far given the circumstances.