We finally have some information and proofs about Emercoin, Hashflare, Polybius and Hashcoin affiliation and dubious practices.

First, Hashflare for some time accepted only one cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin — Emercoin and that is already suspicious. They have not accepted more popular currencies like Zcash, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc.

Second, Hashflare has changed the terms several times already, first by limiting all "lifelong" SHA-256 (Bitcoin) contracts to 1 year in August 2017 and then by changing the BTC minimum withdrawal amount to 0.05 BTC, effectively locking the funds of everyone who invested relatively small amounts of money. Also, the withdrawal fee was raised to 0.0007 BTC, but actual withdrawal fees that Hashflare pays can be seen in blockchain and it is significantly less than that amount.
That suggests lack of liquidity, they do not have the money to pay back and they are inventing the way to lock most of the money.

Comparing the companies information on the websites, you can see that the same people own Hashflare, Emercoin, and Polybius. The main company is called Hashcoins.

Hashflare looks like a classic Ponzi scheme and, most probably, they do not have sufficient mining equipment to actually mine on all the contracts they have sold. Also, they have referral scheme that isn’t even trying to disguise itself as non-Ponzi. They will give you some instant kickback if you will refer other people and they will invest in Hashflare.
Hashflare has even offered cashback via Letyshops cashback service! Now this cashback scheme is suspended, but you can still see Hashflare on the Letyshop website: https://letyshops.com/shops/hashflare
This shows that Hashflare is really desperate for cash right now.

Polybius should be a second Ponzi scheme under a different name, they also accept Emercoin as payment, besides BTC, ETH, and USDT.

How have they managed to keep this truth hidden for so long?

They have printed their own money to fuel the Ponzi!

If you can make your own money — Emercoin — you can run the Ponzi for a really long time, without any real mining equipment and investments.

And while Emercoin team claims that Emercoin is a perfect currency for some services like DNS, SSL and other trusted storage, it was mostly used to fuel Hashflare and Polybius.

The legitimate uses for Emercoin would never get even the tenth of the same trading volume.

So, the Emercoin price rise was in turn fueled by these Ponzi schemes.

The truth has already started to leak out, you can check these sources as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hashflare/comments/7l3rll…
https://www.scambitcoin.com/hashflare-io/

Once more people will realize this, they will try to pull their money out of Hashflare and Polybius. Like with any Ponzi scheme, there would be not enough money to pay everyone, Hashflare and Polybius will invent some other excuses for not paying back and will eventually default and take the Emercoin value with them.

My advice is to stay clear of Emercoin, Hashflare, and Polybius and pull all the money out now if you do not want to lose them. There are a lot of reputable cryptocurrencies around, so you can just invest in something honest and useful.

Are you considering getting into the cloud mining game by joining Hashflare? Are you already an existing customer? Are you interested to know if this is a legit or scam company? If so, you may want to read our extensive Hashflare review. During this review, we will explore everything you need to know about this cloud mining service, where it stands as of now and if you can trust them or not.

What is Hashflare?
HashFlare is an online site, launched in the beginning of 2015, offering a range of cloud mining services. They are a division of another company called HashCoins, which was founded in 2013. Cloud mining is the process of mining cryptocurrencies via a remote data center, using shared processing power. This type of mining allows users to mine Bitcoin and other various cryptocurrencies without having to purchase, own or manage any hardware or software. Hashflare’s professed goal is to make mining accessible to all users regardless of age, location, investment or experience.

Like many other cloud mining services, HashFlare offers features such as hashrate allocation to pools, once every 24 hours a user is able to select up to three pools as well as what percentage of hashrate to use in their selected pools. They also offer lifetime contracts in which the purchased hashrate does not expire, 24/7 tech support, a functional control panel that displays the users statistics, revenue and its forecast, as well as a referral program in which the user can receive additional funds (10% of referred users purchase) from inviting new users to the Hashflare service.

Why HashFlare’s Reputation is Plummeting
Contract Changes
Although HashFlare may have started out as a decent company with good intentions, it seems as though their decisions and actions of late have sent them on a permanent downward spiral. While conducting some investigative research for this unbiased HashFlare.io review, the amount of negative reviews and feedback we came across from actual members was truly astounding. Let us begin by looking at the current most prominent complaint found online from HashFlare users.

You may recall reading earlier on in our review that one of HashFlare’s features was offering lifetime contracts, as stated on their “About Us” page under “company.” Did you notice any lifetime contracts in any of the above listed cloud options they offer? Well, there is reason for this discrepancy. Recently HashFlare took the decision to not only cease offering these, but also to terminate existing lifetime contracts and convert them over to the current offering of one year.

This decision has led to outrage among users. After having read pages of complaints from irate customers in various cryptocurrency forums regarding the sudden change, it seems as though this has led to HashFlare losing many existing users as well as potential new customers. Some users threatened legal action, while others simply stated that they had been scammed and were no longer happy with their changed contracts or with Hashflare in general. It may be interesting to note that at the time of shortening the contracts, they also doubled their price. That is very unethical of them.

Scam Accusations
If you do some proper due diligence, you will come across multiple scam accusations against HashFlare. Some of these are truly disturbing to say the least. There are actually far too many to mention them all in this review, however we will go over the most concerning ones we came across.

The first accusation is that HashFlare does not do any mining at all and is simply another Ponzi scheme. One member posted saying in order to prove this, all a user has to do is look at Hashflare’s daily graph that shows their revenue as per 1Th/s. A user can point their hashes 100% towards Antpool and then look at the graph. They will notice that HashFlare’s graph is inconsistent with Antpool’s graph. This could mean any number of things. 1) On Antpool’s unlucky days, Hashflare is not affected and somehow has more revenues on that day. 2) On Antpool’s lucky days, Hashflare is not affected again and somehow misses the extra revenues 3) If the graphs are continuously inconsistent then one of them likely has a permanently faulty database. Also, HashFlare offers commission on newly referred members, this is often indicative of a Ponzi Scheme.

Another issue in regards to whether or not HashFlare does in fact do any actual mining is the lack of proof thereof. Some users claim they are legit due to the pictures they post on their Instagram account. However, can that really be considered hard evidence? Pictures showing some racks filled with a limited amount of GPU’s and two men working with or installing them fails to provide one important aspect, and that is proof of ownership.

Unable to Reach ROI
Another concern is the fact that many users complain of not being able to reach their expected ROI due to the high maintenance and withdrawal costs associated with HashFlare. Yes, they apparently have a low entry cost, however, profit with cloud mining in general is typically very small and takes a long time, especially if you take into consideration the ever increasing difficulty in block mining. If you cannot cover all the fees involved you end up at a loss, unable to recover your initial investment and your account will be terminated. There is also no guarantee as to how long the company will remain afloat.

Look at the recent HashOcean’s saga, they were one of the biggest cloud mining sites around for about 2 years and were paying out their members ROI’s for a short period. Two years later the company went under with no pre-warning and many people lost a lot of money.

The next issue is the fact that the company HashCoins, that HashFlare is a division of, has also been labelled a scam by a lot of people. The main complaint against HashCoins is that they have never delivered any of the hardware they supposedly sell. Customers pay upfront but the shipment never arrives. In the first half of 2016, they were taking pre-orders for the Uranus vapourware but when all their customers started to make it known publicly that they were not delivering, they offered them compensation in the form of a cloud mining contract via HashFlare. To this day, many believe this was just a ploy to help HashFlare gain more customers. Today, HashCoins has been blacklisted as a scam on multiple websites and forums. The majority of positive reviews and comments found had referral links in them & those are obviously biased as those people are trying to earn commissions.

Popularity
HashFlare is a highly popular website. At the time of posting this review (20 September, 2017), their Alexa global rank was 2,557. Most of their traffic seems to originate in Russia and Ukraine, but significant numbers also come from Brazil, United States, India and Germany. According to SimilarWeb, more than 30% of their traffic arrives from referrals, mostly from mellowads.com, coinbux.club, and thepiratebay.org.

They are also advertised via email campaigns. We received a newsletter recommending them, and several other scams, such as Genesis Mining and BitClubNetwork, from bitcoincloudmining.org.

HashFlare.io Review Conclusion – Not Advisable to Invest With Them
After having spent many hours researching all available information on HashFlare, we have to conclude that the scale is falling more on the negative side of things than the positive. We could go on and on about how the CEO Sergei Potapenko is connected to various other blacklisted services such as HashCoins, Polybius & Emercoin, all of which have nearly identical team members on their sites and who actively link to, advertise and promote each other.

In addition, countless other complaints against Hashflare such as the support team not replying to any users emails or denying they have received certain payments. They have even been caught using fake reviews on their site (see image below), but if we did that this would end up being a never ending review which would take days to read. I hope that I have given you plenty of food for thought so far in our detailed HashFlare.io review, enough to help you reach a safe decision.