Just an update. I still have not received a product and they still don't reply to my e-mails so you can pretty much call this scam confirmed.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that www.asic-products.com is a scam website. I placed an order with them and they never delivered the goods. I sent several e-mails and contacted them using their website contact form multiple times and they never responded. Then I contacted them pretending to be a new customer who wanted to place an order and they responded within a few hours.

Honestly, if you look at the website it is pretty obvious they are scammers, but I was in a hurry and didn't do my due diligence. I didn't lose much, but I'm hoping to save anyone else from falling for their scam. So please avoid their website...unless you just want to spam them with fake orders. 

I pretty much have the same issue as everyone else here against Hostedmining. Joe has not responded to multiple e-mails or voice mails I have left for him. While I didn't initially realize he was in jail for a bit, I know he is out now and should be responding to people and at least let them know what is going on. I mean after his recent legal issues you would think the last thing he would want is to be charged with theft, which will only compound his problems a whole lot. I mean you can't just hold people's property and ignore them and think that is acceptable.

One other avenue everyone might consider is going to www.ic3.gov and filing a complaint. It's a website setup by the government to submit Internet based crimes and supposedly they will refer the complaint to the appropriate law enforcement agency. If enough people submit a complaint against Hostedmining I am sure it will get their attention.

One last note is that my mining rig that Hostedming has suddenly came back online on 13 Dec so apparently Joe has at least some of our equipment back in his possession. I was able to remote in and get the IP address and the DNS hostname. The DNS server was owned by Charter Communications and located in Wenatchee, WA. While this doesn't mean he's actually in that city he is probably in that general area. If law enforcement contacts Charter they can tell them the exact physical address of the IP address. I sent all of that in my report to ic3.gov so hopefully they will do something with it. On a side note I noticed he was using my rig to mine for his personal LTC account.

In my opinion, I would trade them to BTC first, then sell the BTC for dollars at Coinbase. To get USD from foreign exchanges is not impossible, but it will probably be more difficult than using a US based exchange and may carry extra fees. Coinbase is located in the US and shouldn't have any problem sending the USD directly to your bank account. I have heard Bitstamp is pretty good too, though I have never used them myself. Just my 2 cents.

Pretty much just to echo what other people have said already...from a financial perspective pretty much all of these services will lose you money. They are for people who don't do the calculations. I mean when you first hear "$10 for 1GH/s for a year" it sounds pretty good, but when you add in their maintenance fees and realize that BTC difficulty is only going to keep jumping up then you still won't break even in the end. If you are betting on the price of BTC skyrocketing then you should just buy BTC instead. That way you at least know exactly how much BTC you will get for your money instead of just an estimate based off of hash rate and predicted difficulty.

What is the deal with this? I keep hearing the name, but don't really know anything about it. Is it actually supposed to be as good or better than BTC or other alt coins? Or is it just because it's new and people expect another pump and dump coin so they want to make a few bucks while they can?