Excuse me, I manage Soloblocks.io mining pool and have some answers.
Yes. solo pool operators can manipulation of your submits and rippe off you at current start of the art in software of the pool side, eg:
1. Pool can submit your found in a different bitcoin address to the bitcoin network. Because the pool got the coinbase data. This is quite wide practice in altercoin pools in terms of my watching. Some pool operators are gangs and untracable, even by Agents.
Pool cannot submit your found block in a different bitcoin address and I've made a
methodology to verify it.
It works only on soloblocks.io and you can try it on your own.
It was a problem since 2022 and I solved it.
Topic about it :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5397166.02. Current miner softwares only got a message indicates the pool accepted this submit. But it does not provide information whether this submit has beem submit to the bitcoin network? or whether bitcoin network has accepted this submit? or confirmed this submit? This is an issue which give the pool operators a back door, I believe. The altercoin pools and miner programs even got worst, they don't provide the height information of block. You never know your submits are accepted by the network or not. They got webpage only indicate few second ago you did submit a share.
Most of shares you submit on solo pools
are useless as they don't match network difficulty. The only share that is sent to the network is the share that matches the difficulty and it is manifested by
a winning block on the bitcoin blockchain.
On soloblocks you can see current realtime height of current job.
3. After you submit your found to the pool, the pool firstly verify your submit with pool's share difficulty and then pool verify your submit with bitcoin network's difficulty. But, the pool never return a feedback information whether your submit is above the network's difficulty. This can be done easily in software, and this is a key issue in transparency of bitcoin network. Actually, the bitcoin core will return a message "under diff, sth like" if submit is below the diff.
So, there is a real risk in crypto coin mining business. When you ran a miner for one year, and got a good submit, then, ripped off or missed.
What can you do? You have to work with reliable pool operator at first place.
I'm planning to add the maxDiff on current block and maxDiff ever on informations on the Dashboard. You can verify it by yourself with your mining software as they calculate the shareDiff.
Sorry for this specific response but I've worked hard to adress these issues and the work is done and online and I still have ZERO miners on the pool since 1 year.