Gawminers right now is initiating fraud that is beyond the scope of most bitcoin scams, maybe second only to MTGOX.
They are misrepresenting their products and fraudulently shifting hidden risks to customers. Here are my claims
They are selling virtual hashes without the actual machines backing it.
They falsify payouts according to pools that never existed or never received hashes from GAW.
They are known and have been caught using shill accounts. Not just the company but the CEO himself. Josh Garza.
They are just generally immature assholes that will ruin the fun for everyone because of their unethical character and greed.
Here are the reasons why I submit my claims based upon public evidence:
Josh Garza publicly stated that the payouts from his virtual hashing machines are from a combination of mining, day trading, and private rentals.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8601489 Nothing on the product page mentions day trading and it is misrepresentation of risks by omitting such evidence.
None of the pool owners listed on the gawminers website confirmed ever receiving hashes from GAWminers. You can go email them yourself.
The most obvious reason they do not have physical mining hardware would be to read the gawminers TOS. Here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8605520Their Zenpool had consistently paid 2x more than other multipools during the beginning of the launch. Their fake zenpool speed counter went up to 300MHS when it was displayed publicly here:
https://www.zenminer.com/pool/ until they realized they are claiming to own more than 50% of the total litecoin network at the time. That is when the counter disappeared when people began to question the enormous scope of their fake mining operation.
The zenpool is a farce. It is fake and it just simulates ponzi payouts. Which was confirmed when the payouts predictably dropped more then 100% few weeks ago and even lower than some of the other multipools. Josh publicly stated this was because "investors" were not buying big contracts. He publicly stated this here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8j3lrbmknSgJ:https://hashtalk.org/topic/11712/zenpool-fluctuations-update-update+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=usrealized his mistake of making such statement and deleted the whole thread.
If a pool requires investors to buy contracts for increased payouts, then you do not have a real mining pool with real mining machines.
Josh Garza used shill accounts on bitcointalk.org here:
http://share.pho.to/6pc3a/9a/original . I think he was caught publicly using shills twice. If anyone has proof, msg me and I will send you 0.25BTC.
If this ponzi scheme collapses and if his claims that he sold over 120mm of products this year are true. Then the regulatory fall out will be ugly. This is not a small scam. It is huge and will give ammunition to people like Ben Lawsky to regulate us to death as this occured with a US company on US soil. It will be another Enron or worse.
Please please please educate.
The private evidence I have is much much more condemning. But it should be obvious enough what is already out there publicly.
Also, please feel to present counter arguments.