By
Tatsiana Yablonskaya
December 1st, 2015
GAW Miners is being prosecuted by Mississippi Power Company for failure to make payment for services provided.
Mississippi Power Company (MPC) institutes a suit against GAW Miners for upwards of $350,000 for failure to make payment for services provided, according to a court document from the Southern District of Mississippi Court System.
On September 29, 2014, the two parties reached an agreement where MPC would provide power to GAW Miners in a unique way that required MPC to “invest in the purchase of certain transformers and incur the cost of installing such transformers.”
According to the court document, the cost was $49,335.20 to install, not including the equipment costs. The electric service started on October 15, 2014 and GAW Miners has made only one payment to MPC, instead of monthly payments during the period.
Consequently, MPC cut power to GAW Miners’ facility on January 27, 2015. The argument is that because Mississippi Power Company provided a service that GAW Miners never paid for, MPC has suffered certain damages that they believe should be recoverable.
MPC wants to return the cost of the remaining eight months on the contract plus the cost of installing the unique transformers, which is $73,493.48. Moreover, the company wants GAW Miners to pay the $223,818.61 that was owed to the power company at the time power was cut off to the facility. As a result of this, MPC argues that it has provoked damages equal to $346,647.29, not including interest, costs, and any attorney’s fees.
GAW Miners founded by Josh Garza has recently been having difficulties.
There has been an opinion among the representatives of Bitcoin community for months that GAW Miners may be a scam, or at least could be engaged in illegal activities. There have been threads both on BitcoinTalk and Reddit with titles like “GAW Miners – Liars, Frauds – A brief recap of what we know.”
Josh Garza didn’t present at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami. He has preliminary canceled his speech and Q&A session without giving a specific reason to the organizers of TNABC.
In January, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) holded an investigation of GAW Miners. CoinFire, a Bitcoin news site, and its sources, cited “1,000 pages of a [leaked] investigation file” on January 20.
Furthermore, in March, 2015, users of Bitcoin exchange Paybase, operated by GAW Miners, reported that they were having difficulties in withdrawing funds.
