Payout Issues – Dec 2014
December 23, 2014
 
Many of you have had payout issues from LTCGear in the past couple weeks just as I have. Either not receiving any BTC or LTC and / or receiving shares instead of coins. Chris is not known for good levels of communication, so I will piece together here what the situation is. Some of this post will be fact, some will be speculation, and some will just be opinion; I will try to differentiate between all of these as best as I can.
 
The Hack
In late November, LTCGear came under attack by hackers that were trying to do no good. The assumption is that it came from a competitor, but that is purely speculation. The hack started with DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service attacks) which are used to cripple a website, either slowing it down or taking it offline completely temporarily. DDoS attacks are sometimes used to mask malicious code being injected into the site as the focus is on the attack and not diagnosing anything else. Another problem that could be caused from a DDoS attack is that it corrupts parts of the database that runs the site by flooding it with requests that it can’t keep up with. In this case, it seems that both of these played a factor.
 
The Address Issue
Chris from LTCGear stated that there were many reports that payout addresses had changed without user intervention. When he investigated further he saw this to be true and a result of the hack. Payments were sent to addresses created by the hackers and lined their pockets instead of the investors that it was meant to go to. This is what caused the first of the payout slowdowns/halts that we experienced a few weeks ago. Mixed with the large quantity of orders during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, there was a lot of BTC and LTC at stake. When he confirmed this, he immediately put a stop to automatic payouts and switched to a manual way of doing things which is much more cumbersome and tedious; and of course much slower. With the possibility of those addresses also being incorrect and the threat of further hacks, he implemented a new security measure that locks accounts for 24 hours if anything is changed. While this is only a stopgap solution, it works well for the time being.
 
The Manual Payout
While 6 months ago when he last did manual payouts there were only dozens of investors, now there are thousands. Each payout address has to be verified and then sent out manually which takes a few minutes per account. Multiply that by the thousands of users and you have a task that would take weeks to do…hence the rolling delays. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern, but some users are receiving payments right away while others are waiting over a week; making them behind by two payouts. It doesn’t matter if you are taking payment in BTC, LTC, or shares, nor if you have adjusted your account or bought shares or not touched it in months; all accounts are affected and he is going through them in his own order which he has not disclosed. He assures that everyone will get paid in time as he goes through them, and on the Litecointalk.org forums there are waves of people commenting how they have been paid. Again, manual makes everything slower.
 
The Gen2 Farm
While we expect this situation to be righted and him to be quick with it, this was an unforeseen circumstance which is right in the middle of a very time consuming project of getting the Generation 2 farm online. This will probably push the date back from mid-January to mid-February (speculation) as most of his day is dedicated to working on the payout instead of upgrading the farm. I do not know if his time is being split between all these things on his plate or if he is just focusing on the payouts for now, but I do know that he is dealing with a lot of pressure and stress right now from all of this happening. The Gen2 miners going on the backburner for a little bit will impact more than we know at this moment, so only time will tell on those.
 
The Contact Form
On the LTCGear website there is a contact form, and I can guarantee that it is being used to it’s maximum capacity at the moment. With many people complaining about the poor communication and how they sent many emails with no response, I feel bad for Chris’ email server. 95% of the emails will be the same saying something along the lines of “where is my payout?”, but these emails only work to slow the process down even further. Even though he is not replying to those emails at the moment, he is still checking the email address for anything of even greater importance. Thousands of emails a day and he has to sift through those instead of working on his manual verification process for the payouts. When everything is good he does not respond to all emails, when things hit the fan like they currently are he is even less likely because of everything else that takes greater priority right now. I am not saying DON’T send a message, I am just saying to not expect a response and know that the more he gets the slower he can take care of the issues at hand.
 
The Result
Patience. There is a lot of panic and rants and talk about it possibly being a scam or a ponzi scheme. That is almost the same as thinking for those 10 minutes that Facebook was down a couple months ago that they have run away with all our data. Even the biggest of sites have succumb to attacks, the smaller ones are in the cross-hairs if they get big enough and are much easier to destroy. While the site and database have experienced problems, the miners are untouched and still running at 100% efficiency, so it just comes down to patience. Everything will get sorted out as it always has. If you do not think so and think everything is lost, you are welcome to sell your shares to us and recover as much as you can. For the rest of us, just a little bit of patience and everything will be solved. There will be delays in payouts, the multiplication might be a little late, and activation of the Gen2 shares might be pushed back; but everything WILL happen when there is time. Patience.
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Re: [LTCGear] Weekly payout questions, panics and rants
« Reply #5637 on: Today at 12:10:07 PM »
Quote from: jackbox on Today at 11:48:18 AM
This was posted on one of the major share reseller's website. Let's hope what he believes is what is actually happening.
 
Quote
Payout Issues – Dec 2014
December 23, 2014
 
Many of you have had payout issues from LTCGear in the past couple weeks just as I have. Either not receiving any BTC or LTC and / or receiving shares instead of coins. Chris is not known for good levels of communication, so I will piece together here what the situation is. Some of this post will be fact, some will be speculation, and some will just be opinion; I will try to differentiate between all of these as best as I can.
 
The Hack
In late November, LTCGear came under attack by hackers that were trying to do no good. The assumption is that it came from a competitor, but that is purely speculation. The hack started with DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service attacks) which are used to cripple a website, either slowing it down or taking it offline completely temporarily. DDoS attacks are sometimes used to mask malicious code being injected into the site as the focus is on the attack and not diagnosing anything else. Another problem that could be caused from a DDoS attack is that it corrupts parts of the database that runs the site by flooding it with requests that it can’t keep up with. In this case, it seems that both of these played a factor.
 
The Address Issue
Chris from LTCGear stated that there were many reports that payout addresses had changed without user intervention. When he investigated further he saw this to be true and a result of the hack. Payments were sent to addresses created by the hackers and lined their pockets instead of the investors that it was meant to go to. This is what caused the first of the payout slowdowns/halts that we experienced a few weeks ago. Mixed with the large quantity of orders during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, there was a lot of BTC and LTC at stake. When he confirmed this, he immediately put a stop to automatic payouts and switched to a manual way of doing things which is much more cumbersome and tedious; and of course much slower. With the possibility of those addresses also being incorrect and the threat of further hacks, he implemented a new security measure that locks accounts for 24 hours if anything is changed. While this is only a stopgap solution, it works well for the time being.
 
The Manual Payout
While 6 months ago when he last did manual payouts there were only dozens of investors, now there are thousands. Each payout address has to be verified and then sent out manually which takes a few minutes per account. Multiply that by the thousands of users and you have a task that would take weeks to do…hence the rolling delays. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern, but some users are receiving payments right away while others are waiting over a week; making them behind by two payouts. It doesn’t matter if you are taking payment in BTC, LTC, or shares, nor if you have adjusted your account or bought shares or not touched it in months; all accounts are affected and he is going through them in his own order which he has not disclosed. He assures that everyone will get paid in time as he goes through them, and on the Litecointalk.org forums there are waves of people commenting how they have been paid. Again, manual makes everything slower.
 
The Gen2 Farm
While we expect this situation to be righted and him to be quick with it, this was an unforeseen circumstance which is right in the middle of a very time consuming project of getting the Generation 2 farm online. This will probably push the date back from mid-January to mid-February (speculation) as most of his day is dedicated to working on the payout instead of upgrading the farm. I do not know if his time is being split between all these things on his plate or if he is just focusing on the payouts for now, but I do know that he is dealing with a lot of pressure and stress right now from all of this happening. The Gen2 miners going on the backburner for a little bit will impact more than we know at this moment, so only time will tell on those.
 
The Contact Form
On the LTCGear website there is a contact form, and I can guarantee that it is being used to it’s maximum capacity at the moment. With many people complaining about the poor communication and how they sent many emails with no response, I feel bad for Chris’ email server. 95% of the emails will be the same saying something along the lines of “where is my payout?”, but these emails only work to slow the process down even further. Even though he is not replying to those emails at the moment, he is still checking the email address for anything of even greater importance. Thousands of emails a day and he has to sift through those instead of working on his manual verification process for the payouts. When everything is good he does not respond to all emails, when things hit the fan like they currently are he is even less likely because of everything else that takes greater priority right now. I am not saying DON’T send a message, I am just saying to not expect a response and know that the more he gets the slower he can take care of the issues at hand.
 
The Result
Patience. There is a lot of panic and rants and talk about it possibly being a scam or a ponzi scheme. That is almost the same as thinking for those 10 minutes that Facebook was down a couple months ago that they have run away with all our data. Even the biggest of sites have succumb to attacks, the smaller ones are in the cross-hairs if they get big enough and are much easier to destroy. While the site and database have experienced problems, the miners are untouched and still running at 100% efficiency, so it just comes down to patience. Everything will get sorted out as it always has. If you do not think so and think everything is lost, you are welcome to sell your shares to us and recover as much as you can. For the rest of us, just a little bit of patience and everything will be solved. There will be delays in payouts, the multiplication might be a little late, and activation of the Gen2 shares might be pushed back; but everything WILL happen when there is time. Patience.

Payout Issues – Dec 2014
December 23, 2014

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