And of course I opened my mouth without checking it out close enough first.
Turns out the site is owned by bitmain, i.e. antpool. So perhaps not a scam, just scammy.
This is the same company that produced most of the empty blocks last month which the blockchain is sitting chock full and nearly 100,000 txs are sitting backlogged.

So glad I pointed my miners elsewhere.

@rogerkver is there any particular reason that bitcoin continues to allow empty blocks as valid? Seems to me that would be a really simple fix to update the clients to reject empty blocks when there are any backlogged transactions at all.