This is the hard thing among with these kind of cloud mining investments even how reputable and how long they are operational and i agree on the things you do have said.They do have the full control or manipulation as they like and as an investor you wont really have any choice but to follow on whats being said if you dont like to experience such problems with them.For those early investor back in the past with HF i do believe they are already on profits and since difficulty rise up they make such changes and for those who came in too late will really feel the difference when it comes to profit talks.
I think the methods of HashFlare is simply because they are a ponzi. While I do believe that they have miners available and are actually mining, I believe they were operating at a loss due to the "lifetime" contracts they offered upon launching their services. With the given changes, I'm fairly certain that they are now profitable. With all of the dead accounts with balances, to the raising of fees, they seemed to have found a model that works. They blame difficulty rising and the inflated prices of Bitcoin, but I believe that it's no longer worth any time to buy any hashrates with HF anymore. Like I stated before, as soon as my contract ends, I will be withdrawing all of my crypto from this site and won't be looking back!
Yes, indeed. if they were not operating at a loss then they would not so blatantly rip their customers off. Clearly, they are probably overpromising or overdelivering on their promises. Even though users can set the mining pool configuration and coin configuration i don't think that they're actually actively switching pools as a result of the individual changes their customers made.
They could have been using
some of the investments to fund actual miners, to make themselves look legit. But then I think that they probably made some sort of high risk investment in which they lost a large sum of money. For instance, speculating on certain altcoins which made them lose money.
While we can't confirm these suspicions, the smart move here is to move your money out. They may be insolvent, which is why they're trying to up the minimums and reduce contracts to 1 year. And you never want to risk your funds at a potentially insolvent company.