Topic: Would like to respond to a topic about Leasebit.com (Read 8613 times)

Lmao, his quote is hilarious.

Thought this might cheer anyone involved in this up:

http://www.pof.com/viewprofile.aspx?profile_id=59326199

I also recommend you go to Amazon and destroy his book's rating by leaving 1 star.  Not like he's probably selling any of them anyway, and I bet there's a lot of plagiarism going on inside that thing.

http://www.amazon.com/Depression-2015-The-Greatest/dp/B00D7I8KPE/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Well I sent my refund information to this guy by Express Mail.  It bounced from the UPS store that he uses as his address back to the post office.  He has not picked it up.  Incidentally the two are literally right next to each other so he didn't have to make any extra effort to get the package.  His website is now shutdown, as is his email address.  Obviously he has no intention of sending refunds.

I'm restarting the process with my personal lawyer, and they've found a lawyer in California they will work with since they're not licensed there.  I also have talked to the assistant for one of the attorney generals my family is friends with, and I should hear back from her with information about a more direct contact path to the California Attorney General.  In the meantime I will submit the information I currently have about "Rowan Salter"

"Rowan Salter"'s real name is Aaron Arnott.  His twitter now lists his location as Tyler, TX.  Incidentally there is a person with ties there that is named Aaron Arnett.  I currently have someone researching as to whether this is a new alias of his.

Here is Mr. Arnott:
https://i.imgur.com/FNSPty3.jpg

Aaron Arnott has been married at least 4 times.

Aaron Arnott has filed for bankruptcy 3 times, as recently as 2012

Aaron Arnott has had or currently has almost $400,000 worth of federal/state tax liens filed against him

Aaront Arnott was involved in a civil suit with a judgement of over $750,000

For some reason Aaron Arnott is licensed to sell cemetery plots.  (WTF?)

He has over a half dozen businesses registered in his name, and as far as I can tell they've all failed.

Since it is now my mission to destroy this guy's name so he can't continue to scam people, I have purchased some domains.  These include:

http://aaronarnott.com
http://rowansalter.com

I also own other variations of his name.  I will make sure that anyone that searches for the name "Rowan Salter" or Aaron Arnott will find the information above, his address and most recent contact information.  In closing, none of us should be expecting a refund, and I'll update you with the plan of action once my lawyer in California gets back to me.

In the meantime, people involved with this should follow the link below and file a report:

http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

I have received the same letter.

BBJC you get you letter yet? I got one yesterday saying to fill out for a refund!

I will NOT be removing my criticisms or posting of interaction.  You are right, he has seen that he cannot pull a fast one on this community and decided to bow out before he saw himself in front of a judge.  I find it hilarious he claims the negative posts are from people who have never dealt with him when clearly the opposite is true.

F this guy

From what I understood they were leasing over 100 machines, but that is just a claim from the twitter feed on Oct 6th.
If in fact the machines did exist, and were mining coins, he made off with a pretty penny in BTC.

I decided to give them a shot after speaking to Rowan over the telephone. He always answered any questions I had, and was responsive (within 24 hours) in returning calls and emails.
I was really excited to see my first monthly statement, which is what I thought the letter was. Turned out to be a big bummer.

~Neu

I'm assuming they meant 11/18.  It's commendable that they are (hopefully) going to refund people's money.  I have a few things to say.

First, there's no mention on the website or lease that they are selling the leases to another company.  I was never informed of that, which all customers obviously should have been.  In my communication with Rowan, he indicated Leasebit were the ones setting up the miners.  I have to assume he started telling people there was a secondary company handling it because we were all asking for pictures of our miners and he couldn't produce them.

Secondly, my miners are consecutively numbered in the 800s, and I have talked to people who's miners are in the high 8,000s.  I don't know how they decide what number to give the miners, but assuming they are doing it sequentially, it's obvious there was no chance this was ever going to happen.  ~9000 1.25THash/s miners would equal more than twice the current hash rate of the entire bitcoin network.  It would also require ~27,000 individual ASIC chips.  There's no way they had access to anywhere near that number.  Also, if they really had ~9000 leases, they would have collected over $1.25 million dollars. All of that seems extremely improbable, if not impossible.

Third, if these miners actually existed in the first place he should offer leaseholders a portion of the bitcoins they mined.  My miners should have produced over 100 bitcoins at this point.  He obviously won't/can't do that because the miners never actually existed in the first place.

I have not received this letter yet, but I'll be asking for a refund.  It's my opinion that he didn't expect anyone to actually follow through with going after him legally/criminally, and he came to his senses and realized this is something that he would never be able to get away with.  Once I receive my refund, I'll remove all of my negative postings about this guy. 

I received this letter from Rowan today:

http://imgur.com/a/7j4DV

I signed my lease agreement on Oct 24th, Miner was said to go online Thursday October 31st.
It's strange that they were taking new leases when the letter says they decided to cease operations on 09/18/2013,
but received this letter today at 3pm PST (November 20 2013)

I tried calling Rowan directly. He didn't pick up.


~Neu

I started a new thread in the Mining forum for more exposure:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/looking-for-leasebit-lease-holders-to-join-possible-legalcriminal-action-339650

He has already confirmed he is NOT using HashFast chips, but his claim still exists on his website.  HashFast should make an attempt to get him to remove those claims, to avoid any potential damage to their reputation.

https://twitter.com/LeaseBit/status/391206244905521152

No, HashFast has not confirmed LeaseBit is a customer.

Until LeaseBit responds to our open offer to contact John, be very careful of this potential scam.

I don't think we will have 100% confirmation until DEC 15

Does this mean he confirmed it?

He's an idiot...

Hi Guys. Last week i forwarded a bank cheque along with my contract papers to the value of $298 us dollars. I purchased 2 rigs.
It cost me a total of $64 aus dollars! to have this cheque made out to Leasebit, LLC. I was a bit stunned to say the least.
My concern is future payments. Its just a little steep on the hip pocket to have to give those greedy banks a whopping chunk in transaction fees every time I go to make a payment.
So, I wrote to Mr Salter at Leasebit asking him if he was going to devise at a later stage an alternative payment option for his "trusted clients"?
And below is the reply i got...  hmmm OK. He comes across as a little vague in his responses.

"Should just be bitcoins coming your way from here".

Sincerely,
Rowan Salter

This just gets more interesting by the day.

Thanks for the help, but I have a very substantial amount of information about him already.  Again, I still won't call this a scam yet, until the actual fraud is proven.  There are a ton of addresses associated with his real name.  There are couple of possibilities as to where he's actually living right now, and hopefully I'll know for sure in the next week or two.  I have someone hired to confirm his real mailing address.  Hopefully "Rowan" won't use his decade of experience working as the CIA's Director of Korean Field Operations to evade him.  (Yes, he actually claims this.)

His claim about being in the Navy I've verified as untrue, at least under his current or previous name/aliases.  Fun fact - he's licensed to sell cemetery plots.  Maybe this was useful back in his CIA days, to help make bodies disappear?