The title seems misleading; from the sounds of things, these weren&#x27;t &quot;mining companies&quot; in the first place, they were scams from the start.  To be a mining company, they&#x27;d have to actually do mining.  Instead, it sounds like their primary product was the money coming in from people buying their product, which is the definition of a pyramid scheme.<p>Quoting the relevant bits of the ruling:<p>35. Second, contrary to its stated reason for existence, no mining actually occurred through ZenMiner’s ZenCloud interface.  Though customers paid for equipment that they believed they were directing to mine in various pools available through the ZenCloud interface, and also paid for hosting services, very few pieces of the mining equipment purchased by customers actually existed in a ZenMiner datacenter.  Most customers paid for a phantom piece of equipment that neither GAW Miners nor ZenMiner owned.  Ne ither GAW Miners nor ZenMiner was directing customers’ computing power to any pools at all, much less the ones customers believed they were choosing.<p>37. Cloud Hosted Mining customers were entitled to request that the computer equipment they had purportedly purchased be sent to them, but neither GAW Miners nor ZenMiner owned that equipment to ship.<p>49. By October 2014, GAW Miners had oversold Hashlets to an even more extreme degree.  It had oversold altcoin-mining Hashlets by at least about 100 times its computing capacity, and bitcoin-mining Hashlets by at least about 5 times its computing capacity.<p>50.  Though GAW Miners built a data center that, by November 2014, contained significant computing capacity for mining bitcoin, it made no increases to its computing capacity for mining altcoin.