TL;DR : Sun-Mining, an environmentally friendly scam

Sun-Mining is an organization that aims to provide cloud mining services powered by the sun from the heart of Australia. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

With the current craze around cryptocurrency,organizations are springing up left and right that aim to take advantage of newcomers to the space, often in the form of Ponzi Schemes. In my opinion, Sun-Mining is no exception – and I will explain why in detail below… If you are from Sun-Mining or have had a positive experience with this company and would like to respond, feel free to contact me or drop a comment below.

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Overall their website looks great. It’s a modern, responsive, and relatively secure web application that lends to the feasibility of the services being offered. Their prices are well in-line with other cloud-mining providers and they have very similar dashboard and purchasing interfaces. However, this all begins to unravel when you look around the website. The grammar used in use is odd, considering this is an “Australian company” that has an actual business structure behind it. Take their slogan for instance…

Images used across the site are stock photos, and generic content. There are no actual names of company members, or individuals associated with the company in any public fashion, such as LinkedIn. The FAQ, in particular is hilarious. They state that they’ve hidden the phone number, along with pictures of their data center.

For a company claiming to hold a large amount of open land with Solar Panels and a mining data center, you’d imagine that they would love to show this off. However the content displayed on the website is stock imagery, and obviously rendered footage of a stock data center. Their twitter account is full of stock imagery as well, readily apparent when performing a reverse image search in TinEye.

The physical location is listed as “1 Farrer Place, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia” – a shared office location. They list two email addresses support[at]sun-mining.com and partners[at]sun-mining.com. Aside from the shared office location and emails there is no other means of reaching out to the company.

If you search for the company name, this returns no results, meaning that they have never registered the organization in Australia or elsewhere. Searching around the general location, and open areas of Australia, there are no large areas of Solar panels, as they state on their website. For an organization to operate a commercial mining operation, they would need a large number of solar panels, and these would be publicly searchable and registered to the business (or a parent organization).

They attempt to provide re-assurance to their customers that they have been in business since 2015 on the main page of their site, and further extrapolate upon this in their About the Company section.

A quick look into their domain registration history tells a very different story… The website was registered in July of 2017, right when the crypto market was really picking up steam.

Their site has been privately registered throughout most of its lifetime, and the domain is currently set to expire in July of 2018. Fortunately, they forgot to pay this bill for a brief period, causing a momentary lapse in privacy protection, resulting in registrant information exposure. From this, we are able to determine that the site owner actually lives in the Ukraine. I decided to not blur this out, as the information is already publicly available.

None of this information bodes well for the viability of this website. And these concerns are further validated when resetting your password… The default landing page for the password reset link takes you to a page that is hard-coded in Russian, despite the English page translation being set in the URL. Granted this is not proof of anything, but it does help to correlate the domain registration information, giving the impression that the site was initially developed in Russian.

Aside from the generalities surrounding the site, the application itself is much more responsive and professional looking than other competing cloud mining services. The key difference here being that the only option for payments is in Bitcoin. This allows for easy and anonymous transactions, which is understandably a major reason for cryptocurrencies, however not having the option to purchase in Fiat is somewhat of a concern, as this shows they do not have legitimate financial backings, which would require them to register as a business. At any point, the site could disappear with the money that has already been paid by their customer base, and there would be no way to recover losses.

All things considered, there are many people currently using the service and actively shilling their referral links to the community. That’s all fine and good, and I am sure that many will make a decent ROI on this investment. Take CryptoNick for example — he made millions off of crypto mining and staking programs and recently deleted his Youtube channel after endorsing Bitconnect which recently came to a rapid end, resulting in significant financial losses for his followers. Given the lack of sustaining information around the company, real photos of the solar fields or data center, and the inconsistencies between registration information and the listed contact details, I am led to believe that this is just another Ponzi Scheme and will not be investing in their services.

I am open to updating this post, if Sun-Mining can provide verifiable evidence that there is more to the company than meets the eye.