What percentage of hash power does a company have to show to satisfy your curiosity, because obviously it's not about just showing the data center.

For the record, the pictures show 160 Antminers S4 and 192 Antminers S3 in a single row.

i signed up and got 10GH/s free. if it ever accrues 1BTC i'll buy the 20GH/s required for cash-out 
i won't hold my breath!

does it come with bouncy pie charts and meaningless graphs?

Okay this has been fun, but I have to get back to figuring out what I'm going to tell my wife if LTCgear does turn out to be a Ponzi scheme!

Criteria to help you spot a cloud mining scam/ponzi.
Feel free to post corrections or additions.

1) No public mining address
A cloud mining company that wont let you direct the hashrate to your pool of choosing and cant prove its actually mining bitcoins itself, is almost certainly a scam. There is no reason to hide mining address or not sign blocks. None.

2) No endorsement from any asic vendor
Asic vendors will gladly make a simple post to show the company in question is a significant customer of theirs. Its free advertisement for them and it helps their customer grow their business, so there is absolutely no reason they wouldnt. If a (cloud) mining company cant get any asic vendor to post such endorsement, you can bet they dont have any hardware to mine with.

3) No relevant pictures of their hardware and datacenter
There is no reason not to provide such pictures, except of course, if there is nothing to take pictures off.

4) Open ended IPO
Unless the cloud mining is operated by the asic vendor himself, you can not sell an unlimited amount of hashrate. Hardware takes (usually a long time) to order, arrive and deploy. Any company that doesnt limit sales or make public how much hashrate they sold vs what they have (provably) deployed should be considered extremely suspicious.

5) Referral programs and social networking
Referral programs, especially ones that pay almost 10%, are a huge red flag. The mining market is cut throat with razor thin margins. No real company can afford to pay 10% referrals on below market cloudmining prices. Referral programs almost always serve only to feed the ponzi and provide financial incentive to posters to lie about the true nature of the company. Never trust anyone with a referral link in their sig.

6) Anonymous operators
If the operators are hiding behind whoisguard, provide no provable identity and especially when, like in some cloudmining cases, they use demonstrably false ID or company registration information, you have to be nuts to trust them with your money.

7) No exit strategy
If you cant sell your position, you cant get your money out. Thats the ideal case for a ponzi and allows it to run for a  long time.

lets apply the above criteria to some well known cloud mining services:

CoIntellect.com         1+2+3+4+5+6+7++  => 7/7 = Ponzi ( + requiring likely malware/wallet stealing software)
cloudmining.website 1+2+3+4+5+6+7      => 7/7 = Ponzi
PBmining.com          1+2+3+4+5+6+7      => 7/7 = Ponzi
cloudminr.io              1+2+3+4+5+6+7      => 7/7 = Ponzi
hashie.co                  1+2+3+4+5+6          => 6/7 = Ponzi
ltcgear                       1+3+4+5+6              => 5/7 = (very) suspicious (info welcome)
Zeushash                  1+2+3+4+5              => 5/7 = (very) suspicious (info welcome)
GAWminer                1+4+5                       => 3/7 = Possibly legit
genesis-mining         1+4+7                       => 3/7 = Probably legit
Cex.io                       4+6                           => 2/7 = Probably legit
Megamine.com         1+4                           => 2/7 = Probably legit
KNCloud                   7                               => 1/7 = Legit
Hashnest                  (*after merge)           => 0/7 = Legit
AMhash                                                     => 0/7 = Legit
Cryptx PETAmine                                      => 0/7 = Legit

Not rated yet:

Cloudhashing.com    2?+4?+7?   (looking in to it, feedback welcome)
hashprofit.com          1+3+4+~6+7     (looking in to it, feedback welcome)


Disclaimer: being legit does not equal being a good investment. Cloud mining has never been profitable historically, and I dont expect it ever will.  I do not recommend you invest in (cloud) mining at all, but if you do, at least invest in a company that will actually contribute to securing the blockchain and is not extremely likely to just steal your money.

Disclaimer 2:  A mining ponzi doesnt necessarily have to collapse. Because mining is generally unprofitable, it is in principle possible some of the cloud mining ponzi's are just betting on that, and will pay out a large part of their sales revenue in synthetic mining revenue, instead of just running away with the money. Do ask yourself how likely that is, considering they hid their identities and lied about everything else. Also keep in mind this only works if due to ever increasing difficulty, the mining itself is indeed unprofitable, in which case, you will lose money anyhow.

I can at least estimate that based on insane number of sales ltcgear made with his new 'product' (monitoring his shopping cart page shows 800+ sold in last 24 hours) there's high possibility that there will be more dividend payments because growing LTC difficulty can cause this pyramid work a bit longer as was explained. Even If he already sold 1000 GHs he only needs 150000 LTC this week to pay dividends which he collects in sales within one day.

BTW even now you can buy from him 350+ items at once if you wanted 60 GH/s of SCRYPT miners and had $250k USD spare cash - easy like that lol

I suggest a #8, do they send payouts to the address of your choice : for example ltc gear does, but gaw/zen and zoomhash (dunno about others) don't, so you don't really have your money until you withdraw if you can.

This is what I hate about hashie and havelock the most. They don't have automatic payouts to the address of your choice, but even worse, their withdrawal fee is ridiculous.