“Cloud mining scam” HashOcean may have defrauded 3.5 million USD of BTC, and the hacker is now the “scapegoat”?

In the world of Bitcoin cloud mining, you never know what to expect, as there is a fair amount of shady dealings going on in the industry. Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about a company called HashOcean, whose official website has been offline for quite some time.

Is HashOcean telling the truth?

HashOcean, a cloud mining company founded in 2014, claims to have six mining farms around the world, and claims that its business operations are very transparent and that it is also the world's largest cloud mining service provider.

However, just recently, the company's website suddenly went offline and has not been restored to operation. As a result, many people have accused HashOcean of being a scam. (Translator's note: It claims to have an annual return on investment of 405%...haha)

Now, according to a post on Bitcoincloudmining.org, the San Francisco-based cloud mining company has been hacked.

The response from the HashOcean team stated that “the domain has been hacked and sold, which is beyond our control.”

In addition to this, the company claims that HashOcean’s official YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts were also compromised.

The HashOcean team explained on social media:

“We have to admit defeat, the hacker has won, and Hashocean is gone. There is no direct connection between our domain and the data center, but in order to protect our members’ investments from being compromised, we were forced to stop mining operations and transfer the remaining assets (about $3.5 million) to a new wallet, so we can ensure that the hacker will not be able to access your funds in the end.”

But according to reports on social media, many netizens said they did not receive a refund.

Still, some people said they had received their money. One customer wrote, “It looks like HashOcean is returning funds to members. I got $591 back.”

However, most customers have not received their refunds to date.

Additionally, it appears that a number of phishing sites and replica HashOcean pages have been created, including one called “HashOceanS” that has appeared and offers a similar cloud mining service.

In response, members of the original HashOcean team stated that they had no connection with these websites and warned customers to be extremely careful.

Members of the team wrote on Bitcointalk.org:

“We have nothing to do with this company, be careful with HashOceanS. We are trying to fix all the issues we have. A lot of people are starting to claim that we are scammers and have scammed 700,000 users! We want you to know that this domain is the only one that was hacked because it was moved to another account. If we changed the domain, we would move all the users/computing power. We are working hard to get everything back to normal in the next 48 hours. Please stay calm and your daily expenses will be carried out as usual.”

Unfortunately, in the cloud mining industry, such incidents are all too common. Business Insider interviewed a reputable cloud mining operator in the cloud mining industry, Genesis Mining. According to Marco Streng, co-founder of Genesis, the cloud mining industry is actually very murky.

Streng told reporters:

“They don’t even own their own mining facilities, they just take pictures of other companies, photoshop them, and pretend that these mining equipment are theirs.”

There is no solid evidence to prove that HashOcean is a scam or a legitimate operator that was hacked. However, many of the company’s customers seem unhappy and worried about the hack.

What do you think of HashOcean? Is the hacker to blame again this time?