Paycoin and Gawminers/Zencloud were shady to me already at the start.

However I still managed to make some profit from it:
I had boughten some cloud mining before zencloud belonged to gawminers for approx 18$/mh. At the end I had over 20mh of hashpower hashing.
Suddenly the hashlets were introduced and I could upgrade my whole mining power to hashlets - some weeks later the hashlet prime cam out and I was able to sell my hashlets at a price of approx 38$/mh. That was a ton of profit PLUS the 1 month mining earnings. At the end I had over 700$ worth in bitcoi(~300$ profit) - thats when I first managed to really make money online. Thats what also the reason for me to really join bitcoin.
With that money I had online, I tried investing in other services. However the prices crashed again and fell day for day. My bitcoins were only worth no more than 450$. Some cloud mining services I have investd later were total scams and I lost alot of money (example pbmininh)
Paycoin was announced later the year. And the website btc.com was boughten by gawminers. They said paycoin will be worth 20$. Now its worth 0.4$.
If you lookup the first block from the paycoin blockchain, they premined 12.000.000 paycoins !!!
If the exchange rates were still 20$, the company would have made 240.000.000 $ in profit, just introducing a new coin.
And yes they did - they made alot of money at start, where the rates were high. Now they have the money - they dont care anymore what you make or do with the coin - its oficially dead