Because they lied and the ASICs are really powerhogging frontends to a FPGA farm somewhere?
lol. Hadn't thought of that.
Very unlikely: it's trivial to detect this by running a network probe to find out if there's traffic with an unexpected host.
I'm still wondering how I could get 2 Icarus boards out of china February the 7th and they couldn't send more than 2x Avalon units though.