Hi all, i’ve been in this mining game for a decent amount of time, a bit done with BitcoinTalk so decided to become a member here. From what I can see, a lot of people are still being scammed routinely like nothing has changed, even though the list of genuine suppliers is steadily growing.
I would like to ask you all, what you look out for when buying a miner from a reseller?
If you never buy from a reseller, but straight from the manufacturer, good job.
Also, if you were scammed in the last two years, don’t be ashamed to tell us about it.
What was the reason you fell for the scam? How do you prevent from falling victim to it again?
My company was scammed a total of three times in the last 5 years. When we started in back in 2015, the scams were easy to spot, shitty website designs, poor language skill or little knowledge about what they were selling. But they were quickly becoming more sophisticated. In the start of 2018, we were scammed for a couple of Baikal miners. When looking back on it, we should have known, the reseller wasn’t an official company and there was no phone number available. But they looked damn professional, eventhough all the manufacturers had 2012 styled websites.
Second time we were scammed was in late 2019. We bought 8x Bitmain Antminer S17E. We had spoken with the reseller on the phone and made a deal. Gotten a small discount. We paid, and agreed to pick them up at their fulfilment facility. When we got there, no one had a clue about who this supposed reseller was. We had driven 7 hours for nothing and lost a lot of money again in the process. Reseller would not pick up our calls or answer any of our emails. Of course we pressed charges, but police couldn’t do anything. Website was hopping from hosting service to hosting service, so they stayed live for another year.
In 2020, we started a new company to become a reseller ourselves as we saw a rise in demand and not a lot of great resellers available. We were building good relationships with existing mining farms in Scandinavia, so immediately we had a bunch of customers readily available. No need to open up to the public. The suppliers we were using were largely the manufacturers themselves and a Shengzhen based reseller that could offer us superb prices and still does.
Then all of the sudden the pandamic broke out, the entire market became a lot more tough to make forecasts for and we had change plans a bit. We saw that face masks might start to get scarce so we looked to buy a large amount of FFP3 face masks in China. We had a various skype video meetings with suppliers. We would not be scammed again. Oh boy, they got us good. We received a sample order of 1k FFP3 facemasks and decided to buy another 59k, totalling 60k FFP3 face masks. Not a huge amount, i’ll admit, but we wanted to start slow. Well, that follow up order never arrived. Those masks were selling for $0.67 a piece, so you do the math. We were not happy.
Then we decided to do the whole thing again with a another supplier and got more lucky haha.
So far we’re learning a lot from the people who scammed us, in fact, it’s a calculated risk for us now. We hold reserves in case we get scammed again. It’s sad and we try our best not to get scammed, but some times you have to take risks and it’s better to identify those risks before you take them.
What’s your story?