On the one hand many people (such as myself) were calling this a likely scam since maybe September last year? When they claimed to have delivered 100s of miners already, yet were not able to provide a single shred of evidence.
On the other hand there are so many people on these forums that buy from scams like this and then sit on the forums all day defending them to the death.
Probably their shill discount helped (if you "defended" them on the forums you got a "discount" lol)
It's a reminder that just because you paid for something, and talked with a guy on the phone does not mean it is a good company and until you have a working product in your hand you better not be telling everyone what a great company they are.
I'm not sure that they started out as a scam, but maybe just a naive guy thinking he was going to buy some ASIC boards assemble them into cases and make a bundle of money. Problem is when the boards never came, instead of acting honestly and offering refunds etc... he made BFL-like decisions instead; at which point it became a full on scam.
Sorry you got burnt, but didn't you read any of the forum posts about how this was a likely scam? By December 2013 there was plenty of reason not to buy from AMT? If i search through your post history will I find posts of your praising AMT?
I did not post anything positive about them, It seemed at the time a lot of people were jumping on board. My idea was to give them a shot because they were in the town I grew up in. The original design looked great, a very small PC very neat looking. Listed I think 600-900w? Well, what we got is a HUGE PC with 1500W with wires hanging all over like a DIY ASICMINER. That really doesn't matter, because the things die right away. I am sure there are 50% of the post saying they were a scam, but maybe I was too trusting and gave them a shot.
Now, what's more you would think someone who would do this would be out of business, Not so. They took all of our pre-order money and now they are doing things like buying 75k technobit license, talking about building scrypt miners, talking about getting hosting for miners, a new location. All while they still have the original pre-order money and have not refunded ONE DIME! There is a class action lawsuit, and likely we will get something. But the lost bitcoin income from 2013 would be a huge amount that I doubt they have any intention to pay us back for. Also, 6k today should buy about 6Th/s of mining power. All of us have lost, no idea what we will get back from the lawsuit. I just post this so perhaps others can be careful on who you deal with.
I was also a buyer and I bought because they were endorsed by the manufacturer Bitmine (in Swizerland) as the exclusive U.S. distributor.
I figured that all the had to do was assemble cases. Something almost anyone can do.
Unfortunately, AMT chose to do it the hard way. They decided to manufacture their own boards!
If they had taken a reliable design from Technobit and just shipped them complete units, they would be fine.
But no! These folks thought themselves to much smarter than they really are. They decide to sell a 1.2 Th/s system rather than a 1 Th/s system that Bitmine had. Instead if 5 boards they needed 6 boards. They never could build such a system!
Anyway, because this is a U.S. seller, we had always a legal recourse if they failed to deliver. I don't know what recourse I would have if I bought something abroad.