Mining City Review - Scam or Not?

You can find many companies that claim they provide cloud mining services. It means that these companies have powerful mining farms and you can rent some power from them. This power will make you some money via mining. The concept is popular because many people want cryptocurrencies but don't have proper equipment nor money for buying it so cloud mining seems to be an easy way to hop on the mining train. However, if you read the user reviews, you will find out that most of the cloud mining contracts offered by mining platforms turned out to be not profitable. More than that, there is an overwhelming amount of cloud mining companies that don't seem trustworthy or turn out to be outright scams.

Today we will speak about Mining City, a young platform that greets visitors with a video sporting a huge mining farm and an office full of workers celebrating something. The platform promotes itself as the leader of the market (the same strategy is annoyingly used by nearly EVERY single cryptocurrency company). Mining City managed to attract many users but soon the project became a subject of scam accusations and investigations. In this review, we will find out if Mining City is a scam or rather a legit service and see what features the platform offers to its users.

1. What Is Mining City?
2. Registration & KYC
3. Costs
4. Is Mining City Safe?

What Is Mining City?

Mining City is a cloud mining company founded in 2019 by its current CEO Greg Rogowski. According to the Mining City website, prior to creating a cloud mining platform, Rogowski was working for European brands in the marketing and media spheres. Greg is believed to be a Poland resident. Mining City is registered in Cyprus.

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The platform offers mining plans. Users can earn both via cloud mining (using a rented hash power) and through referral rewards. There are photos from the events (summits) held by Mining City around the world. However, apart from dates and photos, there is no info about these events.

Registration & KYC

Registration on Mining City is problematic as you cannot sign up without putting a referrer. If you are yet to get a referral code you have no chance to try Mining City out. Other data that is needed while signing up are name, surname, and email. Also, you should set a password and a username. The harder task is completing KYC.

Mining City is KYC compliant meaning that you might be requested to provide personal information at some point. This info contains the following: name, surname, date and country of birth, current citizenship, location, email address, phone number, full address, scans of identity documents, series, number, expiration date, geolocation, IP address, tax identification, crypto wallet address, trading activity info, balances, proof of address, and other data that is rarely requested by other platforms.

Costs

Just like many other cloud mining operations, Mining City offers to choose one of the mining plans/contracts. The plans are called the Standard Package, Bronze Package, Silver Package, and Gold Package. The cheapest plan costs $500 which is quite a lot. The Bronze Package costs $1,000. The Silver Package is $2,000. Gold Package is $3,500. 

On the one hand, these prices can be justified by the fact that the more you invest the more you gain (potentially!) but on the other hand, the rest cloud mining platforms provide more flexibility over the amounts of money you may invest or at least have cheaper offers for those who want to try out the platform first or who don't want or cannot invest much money. So when you decide to buy one of these plans you find yourself in a situation where you have to trust the platform that doesn't provide much info about itself, you don't know if the investment will be profitable, you already know that you can be requested to provide excessive personal data about yourself, and invest at least $500 to this obscure entity. Wow. 

This barrier (the inability to sign up without a referrer) turns Mining City into a closed platform similar to a multilevel marketing organization or a Ponzi scheme. You cannot even see the conditions of cloud mining plans, fees, and costs if you are not signed in. The company keeps everything secret until you use a referral link. That's already a shady move.

There are 5 partner ranks in Mining City. Users with any of these ranks receive a 5% referral commission. Different rank users receive this commission up until a certain number of levels (the number is shown in parentheses). 

• Citizen Rank is given to users who have registered and already invested some money. The minimal investment is $500 (10 levels).
• City Builder Rank is given to a user who managed to bring five or more people to the website and invested at least $10,000 (15 levels).
• City Developer Rank is the same as City Builder but the minimum required investment is $50,000 (20 levels).
• City Manager Rank is the same as the two previous but the investment should reach at least $250,000 (30 levels).
• Chief Manager Rank is given to users who have brought 5 users to the platform and invest $2 million (all levels).

It is understood that people capable of paying that much are usually smart enough not to invest big money (if any) in such intransparent companies. Most likely the company targets people that can invest 0.5 to several thousand dollars in Mining City.

Is Mining City Safe?

Mining City doesn't seem to be a trustworthy organization. Using it is not safe and even reckless. Their minimum investment tells us that this company wants to take as much as possible from anyone who believes in their presentation. There are several reasons why this company seems to be a scam:

• Too much self-advertising with the total lack of transparency
• There is no clear info about the mining facilities used by Mining City, however, Greg Rogowski on Quora states that mining is performed by a strategic partner MineBest, not by Mining City
• The unusual choice of the registration country, Cyprus, can raise concerns, too, as this jurisdiction is usually called scammer-friendly
• The team is anonymous. The only name that is provided is Greg Rogowski. There are interviews with him online but he never provides any details about the mining equipment of Mining City or the company in general 
• Negative feedback from users/investors. According to user reports, the rewards in BTCV and El Cash were stopped at some point without a clear reason. Allegedly, the contract conditions are violated by the company. Users say Mining City is changing rules often which leads to losses. The company didn't address many of these and other claims properly. Rogowski himself uses volatility as an excuse when he explains why many users are not satisfied with payouts

The company was paying rewards in a BTCV (Bitcoin Vault) cryptocurrency. It is believed to be a scam pump-and-dump coin. When the price started to fall down and many users decided to withdraw their coins, the platform made KYC obligatory (officially, the procedure takes up to 30 days) freezing many accounts. The price of BTCV didn't recover after the downfall, despite the fact that it collapsed over a year ago and the rest of the crypto market has come through a series of spikes ever since.

Is this our fault that we did an advertisement for the company and we introduced clients and expanded the company’s activity? I have obligations related to the profits that I get it from the company, which has exposed me so far to problems due to stopping the withdrawal so far

— Ahmed Salem (@AhmedSa19547184) December 13, 2021

On the official Twitter page of Mining City you will easily find the comments of people begging to open withdrawals for them to no response. That's another huge red flag. The Philippines SEC called Mining City and Bitcoin Vault a Ponzi scheme. Even if Mining City is not a fraud, the fact is the fact — even Rogowski himself confirmed publically that his company is not good at bringing returns to investors. So why invest?