I Got Scammed

Hi and welcome back to a new video today. Unfortunately, not a nice topic and to be fully honest, it's also quite embarrassing for me personally. So over the past years, I took you along my journey from my first YouTube studio to the second to creating my first own products to essentially building my own company. And most of the time things went quite well for me. But this time it didn't. And it's it's really it's terrible. And it's also embarrassing, but I think it's also important to highlight these kind of things in a YouTube video. And today we will talk about that. The Cissonic Prime PX 2200 is currently one of the strongest PSUs available. And it comes with two native PCIe 5.1 connectors, which allows to even hook up natively to RTX 5090. That is perfect for any overclocking system or high-end workstations. I'm also currently running this PSU, and so far I'm really satisfied with its quality and performance. The cables are very flexible. There are also cablecoms included and in addition also a 90 degree ATX 24 pin adapter which also functions as a PSU tester at the same time. The fan is semi-passive and even at a high load, it is still very quiet. Find all information about this PSU in the link in the description. A couple of weeks ago, we were already here because I made a video about the global copper situation. The issues we had sourcing these kind of copper plates that we use for our GPU water block production back then. In October, we were not able to get those even at a higher price. They were simp simply not available in Europe. So, we're looking everywhere and we couldn't find anything. And then I thought, okay, I mean, I had very good experiences sourcing things in Asia. So, let's just try China. And with this quickly switching into the YouTube studio to tell you the whole story. So at that point I was like okay I will try to source some copper suppliers in China to first see if they have the same kind of issues that we have here in Europe with both availability and pricing. Turns out it was fine over there at least from the feedback that I was getting. So I I sent emails to a lot of different suppliers. And also I knew from the start that I'm not going to order from a single supplier because we were aiming to buy 200 of these big copper plates €190 a piece. That's the price that we were paying here. And you can do the math. That's about €40,000 worth just of raw material. And for me, the risk of ordering €40,000 at a single supplier that I don't know yet was simply too high. So I thought, okay, I will just straight up from the start look for two individual suppliers. I then found two suppliers that looked promising over Alibaba. And I can tell you over the years, I had very good experiences with that platform. Especially if you're looking for industrial parts, it is very easy to find good and reliable suppliers there. So, I have to make that clear. And the two suppliers I found, the first one was listed there for 5 years already and the other one for eight years. And they also had couple hundred verified trades like verified through Alibaba with ratings with pictures and everything. So, that already gives you typically some sort of safety, some yeah, some just a base to start with. I also asked a different partner that we have in China to reach out to one of them to ask for a quotation to find out if this is authentic or not. And they said, "Sounds all plausible and normal to them." So, I continued with the negotiation about payment terms because if you're looking at €20,000 of value, you wouldn't want to pay all of this in advance without knowing your supplier. On the other hand, they also don't know you as a customer. you're sitting on the other side of the globe and you're ordering or you're trying to order raw material for €20,000. It al also makes sense that they wouldn't agree on just sending stuff out without any payment, right? So, we agreed on 30% advanced payment and then 70% once the stuff is on the ship and it's confirmed by a third party that the goods are actually on the way to us. Then everything kind of went its way. Everything was all right. Communication was always clear and good. I couldn't complain about that. And I also always asked about pictures of the goods in between like from production for example. For example, I wanted to check the thickness of the plate if this is exactly 12 mm that I ordered or too much or too little. Then also the length and the width of those plates to see how the edge of the plate looks like, how it's processed, if it's maybe bent or not. But all of this looked all right. In addition, we also ordered aluminium plates from one of those suppliers because that's what we also need for this big frame that we are using and milling for the yeah GPU cooler. And these are milled out of a 30 mm thick plate. And same thing here with aluminium. I was able to verify this just when it comes to the thickness of the plate, other dimensions, length, width, also to see how the edges look like, how they are made and also the quantities that they were making. And the images I'm showing is just a few like I had a lot more that they sent to me. And then at some point they confirmed that everything was packed and that they are transporting this to the vessel. Then we had the confirmation which kind of vessel which ship it's going to be. We received tracking information. We received confirmation that the material and the weight is actually shipped onto uh the container. And then we did the remaining 70% payment. And then we had to wait even longer because it's seaf fried and currently that takes about 40 days from China to Germany. But there's no other way. We were considering air fried at some point. But air fried and we're talking about a couple of tons in weight for the material. It's just not worth it. You would pay like €10,000 just for air fried and then you can just not do the topic overall because you you would eat up too much of your own margin. So we had to do seaf fried and just wait. Then sometime in February, we received the goods packed in multiple boxes because it was a lot of material. It also looked pretty nice first sight. So that's one of the boxes and I first obviously checked dimensions to see a is the width exactly what we need and it was exactly 28 cm and the length was also good. So just dimensional wise that looked promising. Then I used an angle to check if the plates are flat. That also looked pretty good. And then obviously it was also time to check purity of the plates to check if they are exactly 100% well 99.99% copper. So I took small pliers and I removed a small edge like tiny piece of copper right here and then put this under the scanning electron microscope where I can do EDX analysis and check if this is 99.99 something% copper. Then put everything into the SEM. That's also what we can see inside. So tiny pieces of two plates. I took two samples to just check purity of two plates at once. I then zoomed into the exact working distance that I need for the EDX. I also added some measurement for you. So you can see it's just about 1 millm particle size that I used as just a sample to test the copper purity. And then EDX tells me it is indeed 100% copper. So that looks pretty good, right? Following thing is performance thermal conductivity. This is a conductivity meter, surface conductivity meter. And I have a reference plate, right? The one we talked about earlier. So if I attach the probe then you see it's measuring currently like 98% IACS. It's not calibrated right now. 100% would equal like perfectly clean and nice conductivity of copper but we know like 98% is what we would kind of expect right now. So then check the China copper. So, whenever I put the probe onto the surface, it should make a beeping noise. Like right now, you would think I'm measuring 98.1, but I'm actually not measuring anything because it's not detecting anything. I'm putting it on the surface and it's simply not detecting anything. We then took some sandpaper because I thought, hey, maybe there is some, I don't know, anti-corrosion protective layer or anything on top, right? So, started just grinding a little bit and then tried to test Nothing. Right. Whenever I did it, nothing happened. And at at that point, I was pretty confused. I double checked with the other plate. Every single time it's detecting the copper that we're expecting, but on these plates, nothing. I I didn't understand it. So, we just decided to put one onto the CNC mill. And the plate we used to test milling is this one where you can see it looks silverish. And during milling there were sparks, a lot of sparks. And that is something you typically don't experience when you mill copper or aluminium. You wouldn't have this, right? And one of my colleagues then said, "Hey, I think we have to get a magnet. And you can see the plate is magnetic. Same as this plate. Same as this one and all the others. So all of them they are not copper plates. They are copper coated steel plates. Every single one. And it's not only a thin layer of copper. They put a lot of copper around it. Otherwise, I wouldn't have detected 100% copper under the EDX, right? So, I honestly just felt like an idiot at that point. I was like, where did I screw up? Like, where at which point was I not careful enough? And yeah, that that was difficult because I thought, okay, this is this like 20,000 that basically go into the trash. There's nothing else we can do. And then I thought but you know we we said we will use two suppliers right just to make sure that in any case we will not lose everything of our investment and that that's the shipment of the second supplier where we also ordered aluminium and you can see those are aluminium plates a lot of plates and it's aluminium so we can see it's not magnetic it is tested this is aluminium so that's that's great in theory um so you can see those are these huge plates I was talking about 30 mm thick that we need to make those cases for the RTX 5090 water blocks. But yeah, and that's the they were shipped on two pallets. That's the second pallet. And I think we have to look into the box. We have a lot of aluminium plates right here. So that all looks good. And then yeah, suddenly steel plates and then underneath nothing. Yeah, because you know steel is heavier than aluminium. That's why they just thought, okay, we will add a big layer of steel underneath that makes up. So the weight of the shipment makes kind of sense. And if you're checking the top plates, then nothing looks suspicious, right? You wouldn't unload everything, but the bottom 50 60% steel and hollow. And then we also had the second copper shipment. We had two of these boxes that arrived. And you can see, first of all, how professional this was shipped. That looked already terrible. Absolutely terrible. But the magnet the magnet doesn't stick, which is great news, right? Right. Well, not really. At least, as you can see, the conductivity meter works, but it's only showing 85% IAS. First, I thought the purity is just really bad, but then we can maybe just scrap them and still get a good amount good amount of money for copper because copper scrap prices also rose quite a bit. Yeah. So, we checked underneath and these are copper plates, big and heavy, and a lot of magnetic stuff underneath it. It's been a couple of weeks and I still can hardly believe this. It's that this happened twice on this scale. Yeah. Embarrassing. And also it's it's a a financial problem, right? Like this is €40,000 that we invested into this. And um it's it's not only the loss in the raw material, but also the the just the the products that we were not able to make. And um I mean we will get a couple of I don't know maybe we'll get 2,000 3,000 back from scrap but that doesn't really help us right. Um yeah I also thought a long time about if I'm going to cover this in a YouTube video or not because I can tell you this is this is super embarrassing for me. I feel like an absolute idiot and then thinking what could I have done better in retrospective and that's not easy. We even discussed back then if it makes sense to just get one big copper plate over air fried over express evaluate that plate and then do the mass order. But if somebody wants to scam you with such an amount of criminal energy then they will do it anyway. Right? That's basically what happened. But if we would get a plate in advance, you can test that you will order and they would do exactly the same. So, um I'm not sure if I if if there was a way for me to prevent this. Then we were thinking about what to do, right? Like do you do legal consequences? Obviously, I reached out to them and asked them, "Yo guys, what the hell is this?" And um I'm still in contact with one of them, which is surprising, and I'm waiting for more responses, but I honestly don't have much hope. Then you might think, okay, what about legal action, right? you try to get your money back somehow in China, but the chances for success for this in China is super low. Like for a German company doing something in China like this, it's almost impossible that you will succeed and it will cost you a lot more time and money. And yeah, I'm not sure what to do right now. I will see if there's any update. I will update you. And yeah, that's uh one reason why we have delays. And yeah, not so nice. I hope you still somewhat enjoyed this video. See you next time. Bye-bye.

Check out the Seasonic PX 2200 PSU: https://seasonic.com/atx3-prime-px-2200/ --------------------------------------------------------- Music / Credits: Outro: 1998 Beats - Strange Things --------------------------------------------------------- Paid content in this video: - Seasonic Spot Samples used in this video: - Thermal Grizzly Products der8auer Advertisement Policy: https://der8auer.com/advertisement-policy/ der8auer Sample Policy: https://der8auer.com/sample-policy/ --------------------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:37 Seasonic (Advertising) 1:14 Copper shortage 1:44 Suppliers from China? 5:42 Checking the delivery 6:45 Material analysis 8:43 Milling sample 9:47 The other supplier 11:39 Sample from second supplier 12:47 The damage 13:26 Summary/Conclusion 15:06 Outro