let's look at the claims made by BASUXX. My responses have a "P" in front of them
1. They blew delivery to the point that by the time the product actually shipped it was useless.
P- This is obvious. Original delivery date was Feb 2014. They are just now shipping to many customers. For many people this thing now costs more to run than it earns.
2. They shipped stuff that started on fire in people's homes and then didn't have the decency to even pay the return shipping on their firebombs.
P- See here:
http://ecointalk.net/topic/1348-my-x3-caught-fire/page-153. They shipped devices with faulty components and, again, made people pay the return shipping to send them back
P- this is also true. first, I think they blamed faulty capacitors, then at one point it was the PSU's, then I think it was the shipping companies fault, then they ended up blaming bad capacitors, then I think they had to do a recall on hashboards.
People that received these boards, which were shipped in a defective state, had to pay the shipping to have them returned. It should also be noted that many, if not most, units were sold with some free hosting to test units prior to shipment. This term of sale was violated in what I think was literally the vast majority of cases and would have likely caught many/most of these issues before leaving the factory.
4. They promised to price match competition in terms of $/gh pricing at time of shipment and totally violated that.
P- Several times, this user, Blackarrow, made this promise.
Sept 24 2013
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg3225643#msg3225643 "What we are trying to say is:
- We do not know what will happen with Bitcoin difficulty/revenue in February or December or even tomorrow. We do not avoid questions. We do not have an answer. Nobody has. On that date in February we will sell cheaper than our competition. This is our promise. If products from competition will have ROI in February than our products will have as well."
Other similar statements in that same thread:
Sept 23:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg3215902#msg3215902 "Customers who pre-order and pay now have 25% discount. Our promise is that we will ensure that customers who preorder now will always get a better deal than customers who order later.
At the same time we promise that our prices will be below market price at the time we ship.
This means that customers that preorder now will have considerable lower market prices by the time that we ship which puts them in advantage towards anybody else. Sept 23:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg3219067#msg3219067
"Yes, you are guaranteed to get a price 25% below the market price ($/ghash) at the time of shipment.
And yes, we will keep our prices below every other company.
Bottom line is, whoever trusts us now, we promise that will help them to mine profitably after February as well. If you keep supporting other companies who have ripped you off until now, you'll barely get your ROI back.
Unless Bitcoin mining stops because it becomes unprofitable for everybody else in February, our customers WILL make profit.” They made this promise again many months later in April of this year. They seem to have deleted that comment, but I found it in a pdf of this users comments I made because I expected them to do exactly this. For independent verification I think it is available on the wayback machine (scroll down to see user Blackarrow make this statement):
http://web.archive.org/web/20140501213618/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.3380 April 11, 2014
User: BlackArrow
Dear Customers,
We just want to let you know that we have not forgotten our promise and we will match in Ghash any competitor at the time of shipping. There is no point in discussing yet what extra hashing power you will receive as we have not started shipping yet.
ASIC price match announced in this thread is part of our promise.
Regards! “
P- It should be noted that this was April, at which time I think the expected ship date was May.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg7018927#msg7018927Just to let everyone know. We are not ignoring compensation. We have promised things and we will fulfill our promises. However we want to do it properly. For that reason we first want to get shipping running and get back to business as usual. However we will do the right thing.
P- Then in July, as shipping was actually ready to commence they reneged on this long-standing promise, stating they could not further increase compensation. They have now completely abandoned that price matching promise as far as can be ascertained from anything coming out of BA since.
http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/bitcoin-miners-progress-update-06-july-2014.html 5. They promised refunds for months and when it came time, they totally violated that promises, completely deleting the refund thread on their forum and denying all refunds.
P- they even had a refunds thread going on their forum. They delayed people for months, telling them they were too busy, to please wait, said in very clear terms that fiat refunds would happen in May of last year and then simply denied them altogether and deleted the thread, which is still up on the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140625182518/http://ecointalk.net/topic/558-refunds/6. They promised compensation for their delays, even going so far as to sell people PSU's for those compensation units, many, many months ago and have shipped nothing on that either.
P- yep. sold them, charged people for them. far as I know haven't shipped a single compensation unit, leaving people with more useless junk.
http://ecointalk.net/topic/1383-black-arrow-lets-discuss-the-real-issues/?hl=compensation#entry19071P- they've also made a few different promises on compensation, which was supposed to be shipped when general shipping was complete. Now the story apparently is that they are developing a new miner.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg10792012#msg10792012Perhaps they forgot. I will remind them.
We have not cancelled the compensation. As announced, compensation is going to be shipped immediately as we clear the queue.
The queue has been cleared, thus the compensation must be shipped immediately.
WHY HAS IT NOT SHIPPED???We are working on a new miner. We'll offer compensation to those interested and who did not put defamatory posts on the internet as soon as it becomes available.
7. They made promise after promise after promise on delivery dates and kept none of them, stringing people along for nearly a year.
P- Also True. It was supposed to be delivery in Feb 2014, then it got pushed to May, then it was I think June/July.
"Next Week" became a running joke on their thread as that was seemingly when they'd be delivered.
8. They made promises as to the capacity of their production line that were used to make people think they could crank these out in no time. Those claims were proven totally false.
P- True also. I don't have a link to that, although I seem to recall them saying that they could put out thousands of units a week and bring on more capacity of necessary.
9. They sold rentaminion cloud mining services to people that TO THIS DAY have gotten little, if any, payout.
P- Yep. Far as I know those people got a couple of small payments and have been left totally hanging.
http://ecointalk.net/topic/933-cloud-mining-rent-some-minions-questions/page-610. People's personal data ended up at another mining hardware company that claimed it was sold to them by Black Arrow, against their own terms and consumer law.
P- Also true. Xbtec says they bought this information from Black Arrow in blatant violation of their own terms of sale, while Black Arrow says they stole it.
Oddly enough, not a lot has been done by either side on this issue, apparently.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=626694.42011. They claimed to not have the money to refund because all had been spent on manufacturing. They also claimed that most of the money for the project was not from customer funds, completely contradicting that claim. They also went to work on other things apparently, while claiming they were penniless.
P- Yep, also true.
http://bitcoinexaminer.org/alex-berk-black-arrow-as-soon-as-14nm-is-available-well-release-a-new-asic-that-will-outperform-any-other-14nm-designs/ “We funded more than 70 percent of the project ourselves. “
They made the same claims as to funding in the bitcointalk thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg6626086#msg6626086 Quote from: DebitMe on May 09, 2014, 02:50:18 AM
but this first batch was entirely funded by our orders,
“Where did you get this idea from? Please read again the initial announcement. “
They got pretty rude with customers that were asking about refunds in July also:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg8090162#msg8090162 User: BlackArrow:
If you have purchased from us, your money are here:
http://www.globalfoundries.com/ Users were also reporting that their bitcoin can be seen sitting in the same wallets to which they were sent until they reported a theft of BTC.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=800660.msg9017929#msg9017929 And what BASUXX did not mention is the reported history of Alex Sovu, whom is believed to be the director of Black Arrow and who, along with some others at Black Arrow was apparently charged with credit card fraud in Romania. See this thread for that:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=716310.msg8090697You can also see the trust ratings for this user. Open the 'untrusted feedback' to see the comments left.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=105804
