There is a specific scam that catches experienced buyers, not beginners, and it works because the victim does everything right except one thing.
You research a manufacturer. You find their machine. You search the model name, land on a site carrying their logo, their product photography and their spec sheet, and you buy. The site is not the manufacturer. It is a clone, and by the time you notice, the crypto payment is gone.
This is not a hypothetical pattern. It is documented by the manufacturers themselves, and some of the affected brands are ones we stock. This page covers how to tell a real manufacturer site from an impersonation, with the actual current examples. Checked 12 September 2026.
If you are worried about a different category — hashrate contracts and "cloud mining" rather than physical hardware — that is a separate problem with separate tells, and we cover it in the cloud mining scams guide.
The manufacturers publish scam warnings. Read them.
The single most useful and least-used research step: go to the manufacturer's official site and look for their own fraud notice. Several publish lists of domains impersonating them.
Pinecone / INIBOX. inibox.io — which presents itself as the sole official channel — publishes a scam-alert page naming pineconematches.com and pineconebox.com as fraudulent impersonation domains. Those names are close enough to the real product line that a buyer searching "Pinecone Matches INIBOX" can land on one without noticing anything wrong.
Bitmain. The only official shop is shop.bitmain.com. Domains such as bitmain.com.de and bitmain.com.vc appear in search results and are not Bitmain. The pattern to notice is the country-code suffix bolted onto the real brand name — .com.de is not a Bitmain regional site, it is a different domain entirely.
VolcMiner. The manufacturer site is volcminer.com. Several similar domains on other top-level domains are independent resellers rather than the factory, and buyer complaints about undelivered orders attach to one of those rather than to the hardware itself. The machines are fine; the question is who you are wiring money to.
The lesson generalises. Before you buy any brand, search "[brand name] scam alert" and "[brand name] official website" and read what the manufacturer says. It takes two minutes.
The seven checks, in order of how much they tell you
Run these on any site you have not bought from before. The first three catch most of it.
1. Verify the domain against the manufacturer, not against search results. Find the manufacturer's official site first, then check whether the shop you are on is listed as an authorised reseller. Do not do it the other way round — search ranking is not verification, and clone sites buy ads.
2. Check what payment methods are offered. A shop that accepts only direct crypto transfer, with no card, no bank transfer, no escrow and no payment processor, has removed every mechanism you could use to reverse a payment. That is a deliberate choice. Legitimate hardware sellers overwhelmingly offer at least one reversible or intermediated route.
3. Look for a company identity you can independently verify. A registered company name, a registration number, and a filed address you can check in a public registry. Companies House in the UK, the Handelsregister in Germany, the equivalent elsewhere. A page that lists only an email address and a contact form is not identifiable, and you cannot pursue someone you cannot name.
4. Sanity-check the price per terahash. Scam listings are usually priced to be irresistible. Current-generation hardware trades around $18 per terahash for sub-14 J/TH machines and about $1 per terahash for the 25–38 J/TH tier. A flagship offered at half the going rate is not a bargain; it is bait. Our ASIC price guide has the ranges.
5. Check whether the specification is internally consistent. This one catches fabricated listings that look professional. Divide watts by terahash and see whether the resulting J/TH matches what the manufacturer claims. We found a real example of this: one machine is listed by its apparent manufacturer at 1 MH/s and 2,472 W, and by clone sites at 1.2 MH/s and 2,055 W. Both cannot be right, and the first set is byte-identical to a completely different manufacturer's spec sheet. When a listing's numbers do not reconcile, someone is making them up.
6. Check that the coin is actually worth mining. A sophisticated version of this scam sells genuine hardware for a coin that is effectively dead — technically accurate listings, real machines, no possible return. Before buying any altcoin miner, look up the coin's 24-hour trading volume. If it is trading a few thousand dollars a day, you will not be able to sell what you mine at any size, whatever the calculator says.
7. See whether anyone is actually selling it. ASIC Miner Value and similar aggregators show a "best price" field across known retailers. When that field is blank for a model, no tracked retailer has live stock — and a shop offering it "in stock, ships immediately" is worth a hard second look.
Two failure modes that are not fraud
Worth separating, because they need different responses.
A manufacturer leaving the market. Auradine rebranded to Velaura AI in March 2026 and exited merchant ASIC sales; auradine.com now redirects to velaura.ai and the Teraflux product pages are archived datasheets with no buy button. The company has said it will honour existing warranties, and we believe it. But any new Teraflux stock on sale today is remnant inventory from a vendor with no roadmap and no firmware pipeline. That is a legitimate purchase with a real caveat, not a scam — and we say so on our own Auradine page.
A hosting provider failing. Different risk again: the hardware is real, you own it, and it is inside someone else's building when their business fails. Compass Mining's 2022 dispute over its Maine facility left customer machines inaccessible while the commercial argument played out. Core Scientific's Chapter 11 forced hosting customers to negotiate as creditors. Both were among the largest names in the sector at the time. Our hosting contracts guide covers the clauses that protect you.
If you are buying from us, check us too
It would be incoherent to publish a verification checklist and exempt ourselves, so: the operating company is EVERMINER LIMITED, registration number 76162004, incorporated 25 January 2024, registered at 7/F MW Tower, 111 Bonham Strand, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. That is checkable in the Hong Kong companies registry, and you should check it rather than take our word for it.
Apply the same tests to us that we have just described. Compare our prices against the per-terahash ranges above. Look at whether our listed specifications reconcile. Read our reviews, including the critical ones. If something does not add up, ask us before you pay, not after.
A seller who objects to being verified is telling you something.
If you have already paid a fake shop
Act in this order, quickly — the first hours matter most.
- Record everything now. Screenshot the listing, the checkout page, every email, and the transaction hash. Clone sites disappear, and your evidence goes with them.
- Trace the payment. A crypto transaction is public. Put the address into a block explorer and follow where it moved. Exchanges will sometimes freeze funds that land on their platform if they receive a report fast enough.
- Report it to the exchange that holds the receiving address, if you can identify one, and to the manufacturer being impersonated — they maintain those scam-alert pages and act on reports.
- Report it to your national fraud body. Action Fraud in the UK, the IC3 in the US, the relevant police cybercrime unit in the EU. Recovery is not likely, but reports are how these domains get taken down.
- Ignore anyone who contacts you offering to recover the funds for a fee. Recovery scams specifically target people who have just been defrauded, and the second loss is often larger than the first.
The short version
Find the manufacturer's official site first. Check their scam-alert page. Confirm the shop is an authorised reseller. Refuse to pay by a method that cannot be traced or reversed. Verify the company in a public registry. Sanity-check price per terahash and whether the specs reconcile. And check the coin has liquidity before you buy hardware to mine it.
None of that is difficult. All of it takes about fifteen minutes, which is a reasonable amount of diligence for a purchase that typically runs into thousands. If you want help sizing a machine before you buy anything, our 2026 buyer's guide and the profitability model are a better starting point than a search result.
Sources: manufacturer fraud notices published by inibox.io and Bitmain; official manufacturer domains verified directly; Velaura AI and Data Center Dynamics on the Auradine rebrand; ASIC Miner Value retailer pricing; Hashrate Index ASIC Price Index for per-terahash ranges; public reporting on the Compass Mining Maine dispute and Core Scientific's Chapter 11. Checked September 2026. Impersonation domains change frequently — treat the examples as illustrations of the pattern, not a complete list.