Is GAW Miners Lying about Partnerships?

GAW Miners and Josh Garza have made a lot of noise recently about a new project called PayCoin. The coin has a lot of hype on a range of news sites and from members of the GAW community.

Recently the CEO of GAW Miners claimed publicly that the company and he personally have sealed up partnerships and deals with Target, Amazon, and Walmart about the coin and the company.

Josh also made a claim in an interview with CCN about Authy that they were single-handedly stress testing the Authy service because the requests are so high and outperforming other Authy users,

ZenCloud Now Sends More Requests to Authy (a 2 factor authentication service) than Coinbase and CEX!

And, it’s all because of you guys.

Earlier this week, Authy called us and said our users were stressing their network. Authy is an amazing company. Turns out ZenCloud users are pinging Authy for more 2FA requests than any other company in the space. Even more than CoinBase and CEX.io received communication from Authy.

Coin Fire has learned these recent claims are stretching the truth or outright lies.

At the Hashers United Conference in Vegas Josh made the bold claims about Walmart, Target, and Amazon, and our news team immediately began working to confirm the claims. After several weeks of back and forth between the legal teams and public relations teams at one of the companies we have finally received four on-the-record statements and a bold statement from one of the four companies legal teams.

Walmart confirmed via spokesperson Tara Greco that Walmart has no relation with GAW Miners, PayCoin or any project that Josh Garza or GAW Miners is involved with issuing the following statement to Coin Fire,

Walmart has no intention of expanding our current payment options to accept PayCoin from GAW Miners or any affiliate of the company. Any statements implying this is the case are false. Walmart offers a variety of payment methods in our stores and on our website for our customers which can be found online or in-store. We have no partnership with this company.

Target also confirmed to our team that much like Walmart it has no relation to paycoin, or GAW Miners with a spokesperson telling our editorial team,

Target does not have any record of any partnership with GAW Miners or anyone named Josh Garza. Any statement contrary to this is false. We have no intention of accepting “paycoin”.

Amazon went one step further with having an unnamed source at the company’s legal department tell us that,

If this company believes it can imply a partnership with Amazon we will be seeing them in court if they don’t stop doing so immediately.

The official statement from an Amazon spokesperson was just as telling if less bold reading,

Amazon is not affiliated or partnered with GAW Miners or paycoin. If this company wishes to list products on our website as a third-party seller they may do so. No partnership should be implied from those listings. Amazon has created a robust and international system that allows vendors to bring products to the Amazon.com website – but in no way does it imply a partnership with our company.

We also have no intentions of selling our merchandise through paycoin and refer our customers to the now accepted payment methods already on the Amazon site.

While Josh is declaring publicly and implying a partnership with all three companies it would seem that all three are disavowing any sort of partnership. We have reached out to GAW Miners for a statement about these statements but once again the company has repeatedly denied our staff a statement.

Two members of the Authy team offered the following comments to Coin Fire about Josh’s statements to CCN.

We do not comment on customer account volumes compared to other accounts.

— Daniel Palacio, Founder of Authy, Inc.

This statement was followed up by a statement from the President and COO of the company, Marc Boroditsky:

First off, we don’t comment on the specifics of our customers’ use of our service.

Second, our service has not been and could not be stressed by the use generated by any single customer.

Third, ZenMiner use has genuinely increased in the past two months.

So while the company stated the use has genuinely increased it did offer comments that they wouldn’t give details to one client about performance versus other clients. To do so would likely cause a sticky situation for the company as Coinbase and GHash likely wouldn’t take kindly to the remarks.

After our site’s previous concerns about GAW Miners and the company’s failure to give a statement we immediately dropped all GAW Miners advertisements from our site.

As this feature went to editing a listing for Hashlet had gone live on Amazon. It should be noted though it is not being sold directly by Amazon but rather a third-party vendor. With the remarks from Josh Garza recently it would seem he is implying a direct partnership and this listing to the untrained eye would seem that way — but is not any sort of partnership with Amazon as a spokesperson had made clear to Coin Fire.

Coin Fire has reached out multiple times for comments on this story and a response from GAW Miners before publishing this article. If Josh Garza and GAW Miners can give complete evidence that any of the companies he has before mentioned are entering a BONAFIDE partnership and said company is willing to go on the record we will update this story. However, at this time, each company has OUTRIGHT DENIED each of Garza’s statements.