Bitcoin Forum

if anyone has any proof/evidence either way on whether or not bfl is a scam, id be interested since im thinking of ordering

It's either an intentional scam or will end up being one because of the delusion/incompetence of the people running it.

People think it's a scam because their pre-orders haven't been delivered in almost a year; the date they say they'll ship has been pushed back and pushed back and nobody wants to put up with it anymore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

If you pre-order it will be a scam.

If you don't pre-order, it will not be a scam.

Choose one.

Will the pre-order influence the outcome of the scam measurement?

No just the order will

When a company provides refunds, then it's hardly a scam. Even a couple of my friends got bored of waiting and got their refunds approx 1 week ago.

They still have my money and I'm prepaired to wait 1 more month.

The few concerns I have about them:

- Bad management
- Bad communication
- Competition bashing, while they couldnt show progress
- Pre-orders should not be a way of funding a project

I believe when they started taking pre orders, they had little more than an idea only and maybe rough plans.

This is a very naive argument: a good scam will always accept to pay / refund customers as long as the benefits outweights the costs: they earn more by saving time and getting more orders than it costs to pay back unhappy customers, until the trends of orders vs withdrawals reverses.
Madoff has been paying interests and allowing withdrawals until the trend of deposits VS withdrawals reversed.
Mybitcoin has been working as a normal wallet, allowing payments and withdrawals, until the trend of deposits VS withdrawals reversed.

Even pirate paid for almost a year, brainwashing people into trolling his detractors.

BFL is at least showing somekind of progress now, and apparently Luke has one of the devices working & mining @ 14Ghash to finish BFGMiner.
Hopefully Luke will send us a video of the device soon :)

Next few weeks will likely be very revealing.
If you are worried, then wait until many people have posted receiving and pics/videos of their devices.

As long as there is no video about actual BFL device hashing there is no proof of any progress.

They've uploaded a video recenty and that supposed to be an ASIC

I don't think there is any proof that BFL is a scam, however there is no proof that BFL will deliver on any of their promises. Holding on to your BTC is a better investment.

It really depends upon your definition of a scam.

If I offer you a trip to the moon for $30k that would be an incredible bargain.

If I take 1 million $30k deposits and spend the money trying to build a moon rocket with 4 seats on it, is it a scam?  

If I promise that trips will start next week, every week for a year, is it a scam? 

If I advertise on google that you can buy your trip to the moon for 30k and overlook telling you that there are 250,000 trips ahead of you is it a scam?

Since nobody knows when/if BFL is going to ship and nobody knows how many "preorders" there are, buying into BFL now is crazy. If you bought it last year it might be worth the risk to see if they ship. However, if you buy today and you eventually receive a working unit the network difficulty might be so high you never see a return on your investment.

They promised me a product, a worst case delivery date, a refund rule and took my BTC. They missed the product spec, the date and did not pay the requested refund - it is a scam!

In addition they promised to pay 1000 BTC as charity donation if they miss the power goals. They admitted to miss the power goals but there is no sign of a 1000BTC payment as charity donation - it is a scam!

This.

The Bitcoin community is so tolerant of being ripped off, that if BFL delivers a Pet Rock with a SHA-256 base64 encoded stenciled on it, then BFL would not be considered a scam. The rock draws no electricity, and generates exactly 1 hash. Thus it could be argued that its Mh/J is infinite (or undefined). The ROI is sketchy tho...

Do you have documentation that your refund has been refused?  If so you should open a Scam accusation.

No. No answer to my mail, only silence!

they aren't a scam, they just appear to have totally underestimated the amount of time/skill/effort it takes to create an ASIC from scratch, and their timescales have been overly ambitious the whole time.  I don't think there is any malice in what they are doing though, just bad luck and hitting a number of issues they didn't forsee.

Hopefully there should be a video later tonight of the ASIC hashing for real.

Will

Promise in September (2012) to ship in October (2012) when they had literally nothing (no ASICS, no prototype, not even a functional design), stringing people along month after month and make fun of the competition (that managed to deliver their products months ago) - you don't see and "malice" in this?

Hanlon's razor:

    Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

OK.


http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/k9l5-1e-f457.jpg

If you haven't pulled your money by now, it is probably already too late....

Plenty of people have received refunds.

The product is not yet finished - There are issues putting the power demand way over spec, which in turn means they have to crank down the current prototypes.
That's all it is right now -> A prototype.
One individual seemingly also has one of those prototypes, Luke Jr which has been well respected community member for quite some time now.

If you are making a pottery bowl, half way there it looks more like a vase, did you fail to make a bowl or aren't simply finished yet?

Rspected by who?  ;D

You have been long enough lurking you should by now know who Luke Jr is ...

Well...he has family, right?

I didn't say I didn't know who he was, I said I didn't respect him.

They continue taking money for 3rd batches while they haven't delivered the first batch yet.
They claimed several shiping dates already but they still havent got a working product.
People invested in them last year because they promised to deliver last year. We are now past the first quarter of the next year and still no product. Meanwhile the difficulty has tripled since the time they originally claimed they would deliver.
So their advertising is pretty much a scam and their ASIC products, alstho still unreleased, are now worth a lot less than they were 6 months ago when they were supposed to be delivered.

In case of BFL, they first bake the clay, then find out it's a vase and not a bowl, and that they are basically back to making the bowl again.

For the sake of network security I'm hoping it is not a scam, but what you really need to be considering is your place in line when these units start to ship.  Your order will most likely be in the tens of thousands, and I am predicting many hardware revamps and upgrades before all orders are filled which will likely cause a delay of some degree.  The low hanging fruit has been picked, and if you are looking for a quick way to earn BTC and exchange them for fiat, there is much you need to consider.

This exactly.

Pre-ordering a product that doesn't exist comes with an inherent risk of you never getting anything. You are nothing more than another name for an investor of a business that might fail.

lmao 1 hash

There's a difference between fraud and breach of contract. Sometimes a breach of contract is fraud, but not all breaches of contract are fraud.

Common law fraud in this sort of case is divided into two categories: (1) entering into contracts without any intent to perform the contracts obligations in the future, (2) making misrepresentations about present or past facts.

We're likely only worried about (1).

So, the question is whether this apparently shitty business was taking orders without any intention to fulfill them. If so, that's fraud.

But (2) could arise. For instance, if they lied and told you your order was on its way when it wasn't in order to keep you from cancelling the order, challenging the order with PayPal, or to induce you to buy even more stuff, that would also be fraud.

There are also different varieties of statutory fraud (I'll ignore the federal mail fraud statutes and things like that). Most states have a consumer fraud statute that is easier to use than common law fraud. Generally under statutory consumer fraud statutes, you need to show that the seller made a misrepresentation or omission in the sale or advertising of goods and that you were harmed by misrepresentation or omission. Unlike in a common law fraud case, you generally don't have to prove whether you reasonably relied on the misrepresentation or omission.

I just don't know enough about the situation to know whether fraud has occurred, but the comments suggest that it's almost certainly breach of contract.

There's no such thing as an unintentional scam. The concept is absurd.

What you're thinking of is a fuckup.

lol

Is there any evidence that they have stopped refunding?

For me there is. I requested my refund weeks ago and received no answer and no refund. Same with bASIC.

THE OWNER's ARE KNOWN CROOKS, JOSH TALKS OUT OF HIS ARSE SO MUCH HE'S CONVINCED ITS HIS MOUTH AND NOW THEY 'RELEASE' (<-- Bad choice of word) A PRODUCT THAT ONLY THE BEST ENGINEERS CAN PRODUCE ON 28NM WHILE PEOPLE CAN STILL NOT PURCHASE ANY OF THE 'OLD' PRODUCTS AND PEOPLE LIKE ME STILL WAITING 14 MONTHS DOWN THE LINE FOR THERE PRODUCT! THEY DONT HAVE THE ABILITY TO PRODUCE THE MONARCH, NEVERMIND GET PRODUCT OUT FOR DEC! THEY'VE HAD 3 PRODUCTS AND ALL HAVE MISSED THERE DEAD LINE BY LONG DISTANCES, WHY WOULD YOU THINK A 28NM PART WOULD BE DIFFERENT? OR EVEN BETTER?

DON'T TRUST BFL WITH ANYTHING! THEY BLOCK/DELETE THREADS FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SIGNED IN SO THE UNSUSPECTING PEOPLE THINK THERE'S NO ISSUE AND PEOPLE WHO WRITE THE STUFF ARE USUALLY LOGGED IN ANYWAYS AND DONT SEE THAT THERE THREADS AND POSTS ARE BEING BLOCKED FROM THE GENERAL PUBLIC!

COWBOYS TO THE EXTREME! BE WARNED! THEY WILL SCREW YOU OVER!

Yes there is ample evidence of this. Read the forums.

Even Zhou Tong's relic collector paid back the $50K he stole.

Bottom line, only consider BFL a scam iff they introduce a lower nm-based miner prior to clearing out their backlog, coupled with changing the delivery date of said miner days after garnering millions from such a sale based on a photoshopped image accompanied with specs that don't make sense. Since such a scenario is improbable, rest assure that even if such where to come to fruition, one will most definitely be assured refund protection when using PayPal or their credit card.

Ergo, lock the thread. Nothing more to see here.

Bar the fact a lot of people want to tell the truth about NFL and there underhand tactics! Who makes you Mr awesome and can get what you want around here? You sound a lot like josh.... just saying....

You speak as if your the o my one with the right idea/impression and then continue to be arrogant and demand an admi.
N to do your willing.

Well I say no! Keep this thread alive as bfl is one huge ponzi scheme. The more posts stating this the less people will fall for there b$

P.S all my opinion but you came across a bit of a dick imho

BFL Pundit at work...


even promoting the so Call BFL SINGLE at this avatar. Fake they failed/never made that one.

Too easy spot them, its not even fun. There just payed/delusional/can't afford lose faith people and I feel a little sorry as they have no soul haha.

Buttfuckers I call them

Not a scam, but gamble. You may mine at a loss or get nice profit based on when house (BFL) ships your preorder

Does BFL have a gambling licence then  ???

So the fuck what? Some people made money of pirateat40 too, you know...

That doesn't make BTCST a "gamble" instead of a scam.


Their entire business is based on soliciting money using false and misleading statements that they should or indeed must have have known, in advance, to be false.

In the very best of circumstances, they are "merely" criminally incompetent.

+1

1. Bets not paid.
2. Lied about shipping dates to boost sales.
3. Lied about product readiness to boost sales.
4. No refund policies counter to FTC regulations.
5. Tax evasion accusations.
6. FCC testing was lied about.
7. Over promised on specifications for units to boost sales and then misrepresented the facts in the forums.
8. Countless claims of false advertizing laid out in numerous threads.
9. Accusations of backdoor shipments not according to shipping timelines stipulated to customers.
10. Accusations of mining with units that should be slated for customers.
11. Accusations of using pre-order funds for development against their claims never to do that.
12. Josh Zerlan has lied on numerous occasions on this forum, BFL forum about people, BFL products as well as their competition.

There are more I guess.

Feel free to read all the accusations yourself many are here in the section of the forum.

As for evidence... that is stipulated in the accusations.

BFL = Shady.

Bumping

I'm requesting official scammer tagging of all forum accounts associated to BFL once they are convicted.

The scammer tags were actually retired several years ago. We have switched to the trust system so people must give a (potential) scammer negative trust. More or less all of BFL's account have massive amounts of negative trust