A group of approximately two dozen people represented by the Swedish Law Firm Advokatfirman Rise & Co AB is bringing a class action lawsuit against Swedish Bitcoin ASIC Manufacturer KnCMiner, a company that was once famous for its high-quality bitcoin miners.
There are many reasons behind this lawsuit against KnCMiner, and every person has their own different motives. One of the customers tells us his experience:
“I read in the local papers that a Swedish company was going to make an ASIC. They delivered the Jupiter (October batch) and I was cursing my luck, that machine was awesome! I immediately got in line for the next machine, the Jupiter (November batch) and loved it, I had nothing but praise for KnC.”
However, when KnCMiner announced their next batch of ASIC Mining devices, this customer decided to order them, and he and others were hit with delays and excuses. KnCMiner offered “Super Jupiter” devices instead of the “Neptunes” that they had originally ordered, and when they were received, customer found, much to their dismay, that “Super Jupiters” were second hand machines that were running in KnC’s data centers, which were covered in dust, barely working and some even had shattered pieces.
When the Neptune miners were delivered, they were packaged poorly, causing a large number of them to be damaged during transit, making customers have to ship them back for a working unit. This caused a major loss in profits, since a few weeks of mining time was lost.
The devices mentioned above are Bitcoin Mining ASICs. KnC then started to accept pre-orders for the “Titan”, an ASIC Mining Device for scrypt-based altcoins, such as Litecoin and Dogecoin. When these were delivered, customers found that these devices only hashed at 10% of their promised hashrate, because the software was extremely badly-written. The compensation was less than the correct value, which outraged many customers.
Many of you may wonder what is so important about this; the fact is that if a company promises to deliver a product worth $5,000, for example, and they fail to do so, the customer should be refunded with the $5,000 or a product with an equivalent value. However, this isn’t the case with KnCMiner, and the amount of unsatisfied customers has led to this class action lawsuit against the company, due to their severe mishandling the problems that have arisen.
Swedish law indicates that a prison sentence of up to six years long can be given for fraud, and given the current situation with 24 victims, the prison time could increase exponentially. If the class action lawsuit is won against KnCMiner, it may prompt the Swedish Authorities to start investigating KnCMiner’s business operations.
