Suspicions soar about Mac clone maker PsyStar

Computerworld - The company that claimed it's selling Macintosh clones is supposedly located at a Miami address occupied by a T-shirt maker that today said there is no computer maker in its building, raising suspicions about the legitimacy of PsyStar Corp.

Also on Wednesday, the telephone number for PsyStar was disconnected.

Charles Arthur, editor of the Technology section of the U.K.-based Guardian, first noted some discrepancies in the information posted by PsyStar on its site, including the fact that the company had changed the address it listed online. Earlier yesterday, said Arthur, the company had posted its locale as 10645 SW 112 St. in Miami, which according to references such as Google Maps, is in a residential district. Later in the day, the address was changed to 10481 NW 28th St., also in Miami.

The new location is a commercial building that's occupied by CottomImages.com Inc., which bills itself as "one of the largest screen-printing, embroidery and now garment-dye companies in the nation."

A man who answered the phone at CottonImages said there were two other businesses at the 10481 NW 28th St. address, but PsyStar, or any other computer company, is not among them. "I don't know how they got this address," said the spokesman, who declined to give his name.

After a brief hold, he returned and said he had been told to refer all questions about PsyStar to the same e-mail address the Mac clone maker has been handing out. The spokesman flatly denied any link between CottonImages and PsyStar.

In addition, PsyStar's e-store is now offline, according to a notice posted on the firm's still-live Web site. "Thank you for visiting PsyStar. We're sorry but the store is temporarily down due to the fact that we are currently unable to process any credit card transactions. If you have received a confirmation e-mail with your order's details, then your order has been processed and your item is in queue to be built," the notice continued.

PsyStar does not do telephone sales, so without its Web store, it is not currently taking orders for the Mac clones it has touted since Monday.

PsyStar has not responded to repeated requests for comment and other information. In a phone call today, a woman who answered the company's toll-free line referred all questions to an e-mail address and said, "I'm only answering the phones." Shortly after that, calls to the company's toll number were greeted by a recording that said, "You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service."

The company's toll-free number, however, was working as of 1:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday.