Lets be serious. They seemed pretty damn legit at the beginning!
I'm not a TH buyer so I keep my mouth shut in this thread, but have to comment on this. Hardware vendor selling preorders of other people's design regardless of original designer explicitly stating it's too early to sell? It smelled badly right from the start and was obvious to anyone they are not able to finish the design themselves. That was the reason I stayed away from TH, and it's amazing someone with 30 sample Avalon chips haven't sent 16 of them to TH and called their bluff few months ago. The only reason they sold so many preorders was they are USA company, and you have to admit large, large majority of people who got scammed are from USA. I don't have nothing against someone being his-own-country centric, but sometimes it comes to bite you in the a**. Anyone who claims TH were not extremely fishy right from the start is not telling the truth either to him self or to the others.
TH wasn't any fisher than any other unproven asic hw vendor. You must have forgotten the 4 or 5 other non us based developers working with the klondike who also sold pre-orders. The difference here is that the others appear to be still active.