Theft of BTC - Oregon Mines - Our Experience with them - Scam Artists

[MarsMiningCo]

Hello BitcoinTalk forum.

I would like to put out all of the facts here with my experience with Oregon Mines.  We just finished a 1 year contract with this company and have to say that it was very painful; especially in the end.  These accusations are my opinion and i am using my 20 years of IT experience to make these assertions and determinations.  

This note is to serve as a public notice.

When we first moved our miners, 49 T9's and 1 S9, June 10th 2017 and signed a 1 year contract and every month on the 10th of the Month we would receive our hosting bill.  What they didnt know was that we had other miners at different hosting companies in addition to Oregon Mines.  This will make sense further in this read.  When we moved in, we were given a VPN to connect and manage our miners but were also told to leave the password to default so that "awesome miner" can do its monitoring.  We were given a network 10.0.28.x; a month or so later, they moved two of our units onto a different network; the two IP's were 10.0.10.112 and 113 respectively.  If you have hosted with Oregon Mines and had your miners moved to the 10.0.10.x network  and you experienced something similar please send me a direct message.  

We used Slushpool for our BTC pool and monitoring.  Each time a miner went below 7.5TH, we would receive and email notification from Slush stating that a miner would go offline and when a miner returned to normal hashing, another email would be sent indicating that the miner was back up and running.  When we look at all of the emails from June to June, the bulk of them were for outages that exceeded one hour and occurred outside of any maintenance window during our first 6 months at Oregon Mines.  Since our password change, we show nothing out of ordinary (discussed further in the post).

What we experienced

The two miners on the aforementioned network (10.0.10.x), known as 48 and 49, would go down at least once a week for a period of an hour or so in the beginning.  This would occur more frequently as time passed and as they grew more confident over time.  It became so brash that these two miners went offline for a total of 3 days and after repeated emails they finally came back online.  As time went on, we would see other units, #42 and #50, go down for the same amount of time, usually overnight and on a Friday evening and not during a maintenance period.  In December, i sent a message inquiring about an S9 going offline and as it was explained to me, "they needed to take it offline for the next 3 days to test the power supply" My next email told them not to touch anything; my spidey senses were going crazy right now and that is when I changed all the passwords to all of our units.  On December 17th, 2017, i logged into the VPN and reset all of the passwords to all of our miners.  Guess what didn't happen, our miners never went offline for a period no longer than 1 hour; unless there was a planned maintenance. For those who don't know, if you save the image of a miner and then upload a configuration file containing new pool information, one can mine using your unit as long as they have access to the unit's username and password. It proved that there were shenanigans going on.  So what do we do?  Stay put and find an alternative action which is what we did, we found a location and started our own mining farm build out.

We did not notify Oregon Mines of the change nor did we tell them of the incident until the request for renewal in May 2018. Why you ask? Because they have a clause in their contract that can terminate a relationship with a client, at will, and you would have 2 days to retrieve your equipment.  We feared that if we made any claim that we would have been thrown out in January.  We couldn't afford to do that as other hosting facilities were maxed out.  

So on May 10th, we paid our final invoice for the service to June 10th.  

Ready for the next kicker?  

On June 1st, they shut us down and packed everything up.  We were paid through June 10th, why the rush to get us out?  Was it a mistake on their part to take us offline or was it because of what we claimed?  Oregon Mines did refund us for the 10 days we were offline plus a little extra for the inconvenience; 0.25389 BTC @ $7600.  Had we remained online, we would have generated 0.39 BTC but this isn't about that; it is about the obvious blatant theft.  When they told us that they weren't placing them back online we requested to have all of our miners, power-supplies and power cables ready for pickup; Oregon Mines still has our power cables and have not responded to our last email sent on the 10th of June.

Now there was no explanation as to why our miners went offline during those 6 months and why we did not see the same miners go offline after the password change.  They claimed that it could have been an IP conflict which i know is unlikely as they hard code all of the units to their subnets and document the unit with its IP information and if it were, on the off chance, one of the conflicting interfaces would have been accessible.  They then stated that they do not guarantee 100% up-time and they are correct; no host offers up 100%.  What we established here was a pattern of outages and theft of the use of our miners.

We used three different mining hosts, all under different dba's, other than Oregon Mines; while each host is unique with their issues none of them were as egregious as Oregon Mines.

This is an excerpt of an email sent to Oregon Mines on June 10th; our last communication with them.

Timeline of events leading to our shutdown.
- May 10th 2018 - paid Invoice for Oregon Mines
- May 10th 2018 - received email notifying us of contract renewal
- May 10th 2018 - responded and explained of issue with downed miners over the course of 6 months
- May 10th 2018 - was offered "fair compensation" for downed miners and to name a price; we didn't respond and were going to wait until the end of the term on June 10th
- June 1st 2018 - We were forcibly terminated from Oregon Mines
- June 2nd 2018 - was offered fair compensation for the 10 remaining days; $1750 for remaining days to cover remaining hours we paid for at a 125% premium
- June 2nd 2018 - We requested that our machines be put back online
- June 2nd 2018 - Machines were boxed and placed into storage
- June 7th 2018 - Received 0.25 BTC from Oregon Mines
- June 8th 2018 - We picked up our machines and power supplies; we did notice that our power cables were not included as requested in email on June 2nd.

Thank you
John from Mars Mining

[OregonMines.com]

John,

It is very unlikely that you will receive any messages or comments about your post since the alleged pirating of miners by Oregon Mines simply has not occurred and we are taking further precautions against the reoccurrence of what we believe really happened. 

Our rapid expansion has certainly caused growing pain issues and also alerted us to the need for tightening up VPN access as will be explained.  Note that only a couple of your miners were affected and only late in the hosting cycle.  We believe clerical errors and/or other client greed caused the problem you described.  Every client now requests VPN access and there were no identified problems relating to this access prior to your incident that you admit not notifying me of until months later.

Based on our research, we believe another client may have been accessing a couple of your miners due to either a clerical issue where they were given VPN access to those miners in error or, more ominously, guessed the IP addresses.  Your point about not using the default password is appreciated and we are implementing unique passwords for miners as a result.  Use of the default password certainly does make it easier for our techs to troubleshoot miners.  However, if the result allows a client to commandeer another client's miners, that is totally unacceptable and the techs will just have to spend a bit more time to look up unique passwords.

Taking your machines down at the beginning of the month when most of our contracts begin was an error, period.  You did mention that you were refunded 125% of the hosting fees for that time, something I doubt other hosts would do.

I'm sorry that you elected to post unsubstantiated and inaccurate scam claims while ignoring the bulk of your experience with Oregon Mines.  Anyone responding to your request for similar experiences should also copy me at support@oregonmines.com and, unlike yourself, make us aware of issues when they occur so we can determine what is going on and remedy the situation.

Regards,
Tom Thurber
COO - Oregon Mines

[suchmoon]

Based on our research, we believe another client may have been accessing a couple of your miners due to either a clerical issue where they were given VPN access to those miners in error or, more ominously, guessed the IP addresses.

Are you serious? Customers not firewalled from each other AND you're forcing them to use default passwords?

[MarsMiningCo]

I'm sorry that you elected to post unsubstantiated and inaccurate scam claims while ignoring the bulk of your experience with Oregon Mines.  Anyone responding to your request for similar experiences should also copy me at support@oregonmines.com and, unlike yourself, make us aware of issues when they occur so we can determine what is going on and remedy the situation.

Regards,
Tom Thurber
COO - Oregon Mines

I don't understand.... Why would Terence, your son, call us and threaten litigation in California and Oregon when we are only telling the truth of our experience?  We gave you ample time to respond to us and I was more than happy to discuss this offline but you failed to respond to an email we sent on the 10th of June.  

As i mentioned before, in person, you have a clause in your contract that states you can terminate a relationship in two days.  We did not bring it up in fear that we would be asked to vacate the premises.  Based on your son's reaction with threats of litigation also and "to get ready to spend some capital" with the fact that you shut us down 10 days before our term was up; i think we are spot on with our assessment of the kind of people you are and the reasons we took precautions to safeguard our investment and profitability.

We emailed you on the 10th of June and you "elected" not to respond to us; you instead wanted to "brush it under the rug" and assume that it will go away.

This is why we posted here; to see if there were others who had the same experience.  

John

PS - you still have our Power Cables

[theMiner1]

I have had similar experience with OregonMines. My miners were offline almost 33% of the time for the 1.5 years I was with OregonMines. In the end, I paid $6,500 for hosting for 2020, which they made me rush to pay and then my miners were offline almost 100% of the time until Oregonmines shut down in June. I had sent dozens of emails and calls but would not get any responses. On top of this, they never sent me my miners and power supplies back. So I lost the hosting payment, crypto mining profits, and the costs of my miners. I am preparing a lawsuit if you wish to be a part of it.

[MarsMiningCo]

I am really sorry to see that happen to you.  DM me, we want to help you with your law suit and can provide some good evidence that proves they are crooks.