Btw this fraud charge is very concerning! How sure is anyone that this Sonny person is actually the owner of BFL? The registration info behind their website is blocked by a 3rd party intermediary privacy service
There are no "butterfly labs" on all of google maps.Their listed mailing address is a PO box in Kansas City, Missouri. This Sonny Chris Vleisides person is "
previously of Kansas City, MO" according to that press release. That's the only link I can find. Anyone got actual proof?
Btw, I found someone else on the web claiming that "I did a quick search on the Missouri Secretary of State website and I was unable to find any instance of Butterfly Labs or variant of. This leads me to believe that Butterfly Labs Inc may not exist as a recognized business in the state of Missouri. Furthermore, the patent and trade office seems to indicate that no registered trademarks of “Butterfly Labs” or “Bitforce” are found. I've often read that these are registered trademarks of BFL."
That's concerning for a multi-million dollar chip fabrication plant (they claim). Since nobody makes chips in the US, especially Missouri, I think they're lying and are just a distributor and the chips are made in Asia. I think most Intel chip-making plants cot about $40 billion so most small companies can't just pull a chip-making plant out of their ass.
They obviously have shipped working products out to people in the past so they're not some ghost company but this does all seem really odd.
If anyone has received a direct reply from an e-mail to
office@butterflylabs.com, look at the email file source and pick out the originating IP address. It's not always real accurate but it'd be interesting as to whether it's an IP that resides in Missouri or not. It'd be an awfully long drive to pick up their mail at that PO box if they're in another state but still, lol.
oh and that phone number listed on their site is a mobile number on the Sprint network based in Kansas City, MO. Somehow their fax number is also their same mobile number. Dunno how they pulled that one off cuz normally you'd just get angry fax-data squealing in your ear if someone sent a fax to a cell phone, lol. Must be some special Sprint feature that intercepts and digitizes it or something.
Of course, it's trivially easy for certain people to trace a mobile number to its owner. Just sayin