Alcor: Improperly trained personnel, unkempt and ill-equipped facilities.

[...] Saul Kent invited me over to his home in Woodcrest, California to view videotapes of two Alcor cases which troubled him – but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was so.[...] Patients were being stabilized at a nearby hospice, transported to Alcor (~20 min away) and then CPS was discontinued, the patients were placed on the OR table and, without any ice on their heads, they were allowed to sit there at temperatures a little below normal body temperature for 1 to 1.5 hours, while burr holes were drilled, [...] smoke could be seen coming from the burr wound! Since the patient had no circulation to provide blood to carry away the enormous heat generated by the action of the burr on the bone, the temperature of the underlying bone (and brain) must have been high enough to literally cook an egg. In one case, a patient’s head was removed in the field and, because they had failed to use a rectal plug, the patient had defecated in the PIB. The result was that feces had contaminated the neck wound, and Alcor personnel were seen pouring saline over the stump of the neck whilst holding the patient’s severed head over a bucket trying to wash the fecal matter off the stump. These are just a few of the grotesque problems I observed.[...] The operating room was unkempt. The floors were scuffed, stained, dirty, and had obviously not been waxed in a long time. [...] I wouldn’t consider medical treatment in a facility with this appearance – nor for that matter would I like to dine in a restaurant with a kitchen in such a state.

Source

Cryonics Institute: Patient experimentation. No need to say anything else.

It was a snotty, and probably inappropriate remark. Basically I was commenting on the operational paradigm at CI, which is pretty much “ritual.” You sign up, you get frozen and it’s pretty much kumbaya, no matter how badly things go. And they go pretty badly. Go to: http://cryonics.org/refs.html#cases and start reading the case reports posted there. That’s pretty much my working definition of horrible. It seems apparent to me that “just getting frozen” is now all that is necessary for a ticket to tomorrow, and that anything else that is done is “just gravy,” and probably unnecessary to a happy outcome. ...Even in cases that CI perfuses, things go horribly wrong – often – and usually for to me bizarre and unfathomable (and careless) reasons. My dear friend and mentor Curtis Henderson was little more than straight frozen because CI President Ben Best had this idea that adding polyethylene glycol to the CPA solution would inhibit edema. Now the thing is, Ben had been told by his own researchers that PEG was incompatible with DMSO containing solutions, and resulted in gel formation. Nevertheless, he decided he would try this out on Curtis Henderson. He did NOT do any bench experiments, or do test mixes of solutions, let alone any animal studies to validate that this approach would in fact help reduce edema (it doesn’t). Instead, he prepared a batch of this untested mixture, and AFTER it gelled, he tried to perfuse Curtis with it. See my introduction to Thus Spake Curtis Henderson on this blog for how this affected me psychologically and emotionally. Needless to say, as soon as he tried to perfuse this goop, perfusion came to a screeching halt. They have pumped air into patient’s circulatory systems… I could go on and on, but all you need to do is really look at those patient case reports and think about everything that is going on in those cases critically.

Source

Trans Time:

The principal criticism against Trans Time was their for-profit model, in which, if funding ran out, the patients would be thawed and conventionally interred (This is what would've happened to Janice Foote and the Mills couple), unlike other organizations with a pay-once model in which the storage costs for the patients are covered for perpetuity.

I should add, Ray Mills was actually removed from suspension and placed in a chest full of dry ice.

You can also consider the now-defunct Cryonics Society of California, though I don't think any of the above organizations would go as far as talking about a non-existent facility in the present tense while the patients lay on the floor, rotting.

Things people are willing to pay lots of money for are a strong signal to unscrupulous people. Examples abound of people doing scams as investment advice, counterfeiting art, or selling knock-off designer jewelry. Cryonics is something where you pay a lot of money for a service many years down the line. Someone could easily take in cryonics payments for years without ever having to perform a cryopreservation, and only have it become known after they've disappeared with the profits. Alternately, the impossibility of checking results means that a cryonics provider can profit off of shoddy service and equipment, and you might never realize. On these lines, any organization that is unwilling to let you inspect their preservation equipment etc. is suspect in my eyes. Cryonics organizations are also susceptible to drift in motives of their owners. Maybe the creators 10 years ago were serious about cryonics, but if the current CEO or board of directors cares more about optimizing cheap equipment and profits, then that group might become a de facto scam.