LMG Sponsor Complaints

[throwaway-g]

8 hours ago, Skipple said:

If your issue with the site is forced labor, I have bad news about every single website that sells products produced in China.

AliExpress, wish, people sell products, how those products come to be is up to the individual seller. The problem with Temu is sellers cannot set their own prices. Alot of sellers in China are complaining they are going out of business due to the shady shit that Temu does, as they care about selling and making a name and becoming #1 at any means. If they decide "ok this item is going to be $3" they tell the sellers to list at $3 or the items will be removed. The sellers have no choice but to list and try get a bit of money to get rid of inventory, even at their own expense, or risk being removed from the platform.

 

Ali Express, Wish, they sell junk, but they aren't screwing over the sellers.

[Skipple]

4 hours ago, throwaway-g said:

AliExpress, wish, people sell products, how those products come to be is up to the individual seller. The problem with Temu is sellers cannot set their own prices. Alot of sellers in China are complaining they are going out of business due to the shady shit that Temu does, as they care about selling and making a name and becoming #1 at any means. If they decide "ok this item is going to be $3" they tell the sellers to list at $3 or the items will be removed. The sellers have no choice but to list and try get a bit of money to get rid of inventory, even at their own expense, or risk being removed from the platform.

 

Ali Express, Wish, they sell junk, but they aren't screwing over the sellers.

That's interesting and I haven't heard this before. I'm not sure if I necessarily feel pity for the Shenzhen warehouse or Wuhan sweatshop, but it's interesting none the less.

[iggy12345]

15 hours ago, Skipple said:

Secondly, every time there is one of these videos featuring Wish.com, Temu, etc from LTT or Austin or Dawid, the outcome is always "yeah these products are junk and you shouldn't buy them". I'm not sure how anyone could possibly walk away from these videos with a positive view of the site, especially not to go out and purchase from them expecting a quality product, only to be disappointed.

I don't use these sites for computer parts per say, but they're large selection of discrete electrical components at a cheap price is what brings me there. Most of the time I can find all of the things I can find at digikey, or mouser, on aliexpress for half the price or better and all I sacrifice is shipping time. And most of these cannot be found on sites like Amazon

[Aluminumhaste]

17 hours ago, Johnsnowaus said:

by having a full video on it

And called all of it trash basically saying don't buy anything from these websites.

EDIT: Thereby letting his community who might not know, to stay away from these sites.

 

[DJ_Ironic]

Let me tell you a story about OVH and how I am loosing it when I try to get a service from them.

Why post this long? Because this situation is so crazy and absurd, you will not understand it without the context.

But still in a nutshell: I spent over a month on trying to migrate a server or get a new one, but the whole OVH is unable to add our company VAT ID to our acoount for multiple weeks and that is breaking our company infrastructure. No support is able to help, so I am losing it and trying to get a help through the power of LTT.

How I started with OVH..back in 2017 maybe

I want to jump out of the window because of OVH. Both EU and US branches.

I had a server for multiple years with OVH EU. When we started, there was a local company for all invoicing with local currency, there was also a local support member with czech number to be called and here to help.

OVH.cz ends, OVH EU (World) and OVH US started

This all was cancelled, OVH created OVH "World"..the Ireland based company with French support and EU servers and then OVH US for the US market (selling all OVh datacenters, but under a different company).

Support team got shrinked to the team in french, no tech numbers, tickets only..response time in days and not helping much. Also they decided to migrate even already purchased IPs from one-time fee to a monthly subscription..this migration was also screwed up, so emails notyfing about the need to pay for those address never arrived = our IPs got suspended => services went offline. That happened twice in a row.

You need sales team? On vacation, sorry.

Over the years, the server become old, we are still paying €40 for a machine, that is now being rented out by OVH for  around €24. So I firstly tried to get in touch with sales to resolve this - maybe then can just lower the price, so we save time for both sides ordering a new server witrh the same parameters, migrating everything and losing all of our IPs and starting again.

After the first called I made, I was told that I will be contacted in a week..but that never happened. SO after a 3 weeks of urgencies, tickets and tagging the twitter handle..I was finally contacted by the twitter team and told that the EU sales team "is on a vacation" as its summer :D. (yes, I am not kidding). Then informed me, they will not help me anyway, because their company policy is not to change prices.

I was done with OVH EU, their lacking EU support and the final thing with whole team on vacation for a week.

OVH.US promised better support
During the process of getting anyone on chat/mail/phone I was somehow redirected to the OVH US site. I started the livechat there..finally someone responded. They were communicative, offered a great deala confirmed that "multiple customers migrated from EU to US because of the support."

So after another week of trying with OVH EU, I deciced to lose our IPs, to lose our configured server and just migrate everything to get it done and have support.

The first step was creating and account, thats easy, right? Well..it is, but not when the system is broken and does not let you fill your company name and VAT ID, because of this issue:
 
I am just being an idiot not filling the birthday field, or filling invalid information? No! The birthday field is not present in any step available to me...and it should not be there, as I am registering our company..and companies does not have birthday :).

Not a big issue I said, I reported it to my sales contact (we switched from livechat to his company @ovh email) and after some guidiance I was able to create a personal account that we will migrate to Enterprise account right after creation..they said.

SO we tried to convert the account, but the same error just on a different looking form appears. I tried again, and again..and then was told to create a ticket with support to get the VAT filled in by them.

And here I am, having 1 business acount without VAT, 2 personal accounts, no server and no help

 

Now its many days later. I constatly pinged my sales person to check how is the ticket going as it was not answered for multiple day...and I got a lot of emails like:


I have asked them to expedite this, and will continue to do so.

---

Good Morning.  I see we have had to push this issue to OVHcloud World (based in France) for them to investigate.  I have not seen this kind of issue the 3.5 years I have been here.  I am unfortunately unable to provision a server without payment upfront, this is simply not an option.

---

Good Morning!  I just checked with finance and unfortunately we will need to fix the account issue for the VAT to be on the invoice.  I have pinged pretty much
everybody this morning to get an update.   This is very frustrating to say the least.  I will let you know as soon as I hear back.   Thank you!

---

They are still working on this.  This is the first and only time we have seen this happen, we even have OVHcloud World working on this as well.   All hands are on deck.

---

I was also asked my sales team to use the livechat again and try to create a new account with a new email. That resoluted in like 3 hours of being redirected from support to support, creating two accounts and even recording them the process of creatin the account as thes insisted I am doing somethign wrong.

After it I ended up with 3 account sin total, not a single one working and a another ticket to fix my issue.

I am able and ready to provide my complete email communication with the sales, also the ticket content. I just need to get my server with a proper invoice and let the business ran, that is all I need.

 

[Skipple]

1 minute ago, BriarCrock18 said:

I will be including you guys in it sense you sponsored them and holding this group responsible for facilitating fraudulent practices.

Are you threating legal action against LMG on their own forums?

 

[LogicalDrm]

6 minutes ago, BriarCrock18 said:

Please note I will be making a small claims court case if this is not handled because I will not allow a company to steal 4 thousand dollars from me and take my property and not tell me what is happening to it. I will be including you guys in it sense you sponsored them and holding this group responsible for facilitating fraudulent practices. I don't think it will hold cause I'm sure you can afford better legal help then me and my complaints are to build redux but a company of your size should be held accountable for promoting a company with bad business practices. I tried reaching out and no reply from you guys at all and good luck. This is the worst company to do business with and I never had such a bad experience with a RMA in my entire life. Good luck. I told build redux if I don't get a call by end of day that I will be submitting my lawsuit tomorrow as soon as they open. Again thanks for sponsoring someone who steals off of computers and blames it on the consumer.

You have the sponsoring part backwards. LMG accepted sponsorship/advertising deal from Redux. You can at most accuse LMG for endorsing the company that has commit fraud against you. However, legally you would need to prove that LMG knew (or LMG would need to prove they weren't aware) of any dishonest practices when the advertisement/sponsor spot was released. Otherwise you would commit slander against LMG, accusing them on something they didn't do.

 

So go ahead with your actual legal complaint, but keep clear head on which company has committed the fraud against you. 

[LogicalDrm]

10 minutes ago, BriarCrock18 said:

You should do your due diligence of sponsoring cause you put both your reputation and the companies on the line. So yes I do think I am correct and that's if you are an employee of this company. 

Of the way sponsoring goes, no you certainly are not. On whether LMG was aware or had enough resources to check whole record of Redux at the point they made their contract, maybe. But then again, if your thing happened after contract had made or had ended, you have much less to go on. Besides that, media reading is a skill. If you blindly take everything given, you admit being partly responsible yourself.

[IkeaGnome]

1 minute ago, BriarCrock18 said:

Now that I got a moderators attention of threatening dumb illogical crap. I can speak of what I am trying to do.

Just a heads up, those moderators don't work for LMG.

[LogicalDrm]

4 minutes ago, BriarCrock18 said:

Now that I got a moderators attention of threatening dumb illogical crap. 

I would strongly advice against making any threats when you don't have merit behind them. Anywhere, for whatever reason. Also, this reads quite clearly that you were threatening to add LMG to your civil suite against Redux. Threatening with legal action when you don't plan to actually do it isn't very smart. And it won't help you to speed things up on LMGs end either.

3 hours ago, BriarCrock18 said:

Please note I will be making a small claims court case if this is not handled because I will not allow a company to steal 4 thousand dollars from me and take my property and not tell me what is happening to it. I will be including you guys in it - -

[Skipple]

2 hours ago, BriarCrock18 said:

No I'm not civil law suit against this forum

Oh, do me a favor and include me, personally, on the lawsuit too. I want to see my username on legal proceedings.

[Budget DIY]

On 2/14/2023 at 8:45 PM, Other James said:

 

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have had somebody reach out to us internally about this as well based on a Reddit post. We have reached out to Influencer Stuff and requested to be removed from their site.

(Thank you for the strong British language warning)

It's still up there.

[Other James]

3 minutes ago, Budget DIY said:

It's still up there.

Thanks for the heads up. @CPotter actually JUST reached out to them again today. We'll also be briefly touching on this in our weekly address later today. 

[heythereu]

Hello! I wanted to discuss InfluencerStuff and the recent controversy concerning Greg Salazar and what seems to be other creators.

The video:

The video states that the Owner of InfluencerStuff is withholding payments and has been doing so for well over a year. It's not known how many creators have been affected by this but I think all ties with InfluencerStuff should be cut, including the removal of your LTT brand on their front webpage. Minimum there needs to be a public conversation concerning the accusations made against their CEO.

Company mistakes can happen but withholding payments for well over a year? I would like to have the LTT staff get into contact and either cut ties or get to the bottom of this, thank you very much for reading! Hope this gets resolved. TLDR: Richard/InlfuencerStuff took money from the sponsor and didn't give it to Greg, leaving him on a wild goose chase knowing well he wouldn't get the money from Richard. The sponsor decided to step in and pay Greg for his two sponsor spots, even though they already paid Richard for them. I didn't hear any mention of said sponsor but I'm glad they care about creators!

IGNORE/RESOLVED: Didn't see the other post lol, sorry and thanks for taking action~!

[The7thgear]

I would also like to double down on Influencer stuff. I don’t think it’s a good idea for LTT to have their name associated with a company whose owner has been accused of stealing from smaller creators. Greg Salazar has posted his video on the matter. I think he tried everything at his disposal and gave them plenty of time to own up before bringing this to his audiences attention. I think a lot of his views are likely also LTT viewers and we’d love to see LTT cut ties with a company that treats creators like Greg was treated. Link 

 

[BattlingBacon]

On the most recent video on LTT, Enlisted was a sponsor. This was disappointing since that is a pay to win game, which goes against LMG Sponsor "Do Not Work With List".

[SplitScream]

I have a complaint about Soylent as a sponsor. They're a flavored drinks company marketed as a healthy meal replacement, meal replacements themselves are already a controversial topic in advertising but the company has had repeated issues from its Tech Bro leadership style shrugging off the government agencies.
It had scandals in the past 8 years about Lead and Cadium content, their products repeatedly causing gastrointestinal issues, and called reports about the Cadium content "alarmist". 
"Meal replacements" talking points is enough to draw doubts, but the repeated incidents are red flags in their standing as company you would trust with your health.

[Lurick]

14 hours ago, SplitScream said:

I have a complaint about Soylent as a sponsor. They're a flavored drinks company marketed as a healthy meal replacement, meal replacements themselves are already a controversial topic in advertising but the company has had repeated issues from its Tech Bro leadership style shrugging off the government agencies.
It had scandals in the past 8 years about Lead and Cadium content, their products repeatedly causing gastrointestinal issues, and called reports about the Cadium content "alarmist". 
"Meal replacements" talking points is enough to draw doubts, but the repeated incidents are red flags in their standing as company you would trust with your health.

Do you have anything more recent? All the articles I find for Soylent are from 2015 to 2016 and nothing since then. Are the concerns still ongoing? I'm not saying these are non-issues but I'd like to know if there have been further tests in the past few years as well.

[mpulsivity]

@Sveeno had a thread a couple of weeks back about Odoo but it had been closed before I could share.  I feel it's important or else I would let it go.  I was looking for an alternative to Sage for my company's bookkeeping and I decided to try Odoo, even going as far as to sign up for a month so I could really try out its features.  Ultimately I decided it wasn't for me, however the product seemed fine.

The issue arose when I went to cancel the subscription.  There are serious dark patterns to keep people subscribed.  No one would answer any communications on the website.  There was a customer service rep listed with my account but the phone number was literally (123) 456-7890 and there was no email address.  After several attempts to get them to cancel my service only to be ignored, I had to get American Express to block them for me.

[kirashi]

On 8/29/2023 at 7:20 PM, gerradynn said:

Keeper Password Manager, as advertised in this most recent LTT video seems like it is a good service, but there is no information regarding pricing available on the landing page linked in the video nor is it available through any of the links on that page, just information about the 50% off offer for signing up via the link. It CAN be found when clicking from the landing page, going to pricing, and then to the pricing page for each of the products mentioned on the landing page. I am not sure of the ramifications for not listing pricing, or making it quickly accessible, but I genuinely feel it is in bad taste not to make the price of the service readily available to the consumer, or at least make it accessible on a prominent location on the page.

 

On 8/29/2023 at 7:59 PM, rabidkitty said:

To add to this, if you click the "BUY NOW" button on the sponsor link landing page it takes you here.

 

So not only does it not show pricing, if you click buy now it still doesn't show pricing and wants your email address before going any further. If you put your email address in and click next, it then asks you to verify the email. Only until you have verified your email address will you be presented with pricing.

On 8/30/2023 at 4:34 PM, mynameGeoff said:

 

Hey, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We're in the process of emailing our contact at Keeper to see if pricing can be shown from the landing page versus hunting it down yourself. This is also the final deliverable we have remaining with Keeper, so we'll wait for a response from their end before we renew any future spots going forward.

Oof that's terrible for the consumer. Any company that prevents me from seeing pricing without forking over personal information is immediately put on my blacklist, both for personal and business purposes. I will also steer my IT clients away from the company as well. Hopefully you can convince Keeper to change their pricing practices in the future.
 

On 9/2/2023 at 12:51 PM, AnonymousThorn said:

4/2013: Keeper threatened to sue Fox-IT for finding that the vault password was being logged and the logs were sent to their server. (https://blog.fox-it.com/2013/04/05/security-advisory-unencrypted-storage-of-confidential-information-in-keeper-password-data-vault-v5-3-for-ios/)

 

12/2017: Keeper sued Dan Goodin and Ars Technica. (https://www.techdirt.com/2018/03/09/keeper-security-reminds-everyone-why-you-shouldnt-use-it-doubles-down-suing-journalist/)

 

5/2018: Keeper's servers can request the encryption key during login. It didn't get patched until the security researcher went public. It was patch 2 days later. (https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2018/May/41)

 

5/2018: I learned Keeper has a GitHub account and immediately found an out of scope vuln but didn't want to get sued. So I've told no one publicly. Well besides stating that they have the worst downgrade attack out of all the password managers I've looked at. Well LastPass's is almost as bad but it is also silent. So it's both better and worse. LastPass "fixed" theirs when I told them about it but it was unfixed when I checked a few years later.

Forget what I said above. I cannot condone any company that sues journalists for doing (in good faith) their job, let alone security researchers. This completely negates the entire purpose of independent journalism and supports a precedent that factual reporting (of security issues or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed, regardless of whether or not it tells the truth about security flaws in a product or service.

[Skipple]

1 hour ago, kirashi said:

 

Oof that's terrible for the consumer. Any company that prevents me from seeing pricing without forking over personal information is immediately put on my blacklist, both for personal and business purposes. I will also steer my IT clients away from the company as well. Hopefully you can convince Keeper to change their pricing practices in the future.

The pricing is right here: https://www.keepersecurity.com/pricing/personal-and-family.html

 

The issue is that the pricing readily isn't available on the affiliate link landing page.

[obat2553]

LTT vouches for Build Redux? im having the most awful experience with them and im having a very hard time believing the LTT even works with them. 

Since ive recieved the PC in question ive had crashing issues that progressively got worst and worst, contacting their support team is a nightmare simply because they do not answer any form of communication in a timely manner, id say they answer 1 email a week. im at the point where they have started an RMA process to get my PC fixed but the problem is that they are not sending me the label or invoice (yes, they are making me pay to ship it to them to repair their faulty PC). the warranty is good for 2 years and ive only had it for 5 months and i was deployed for some of that so its pretty crazy that im having these issues. If anyone knows anything helpful that could put me in contact with someone that could be helpful hit me up. right now im assuming the company will not honor the warranty and i will have to take legal action. 

[RunnerUp]

12 hours ago, obat2553 said:

right now im assuming the company will not honor the warranty and i will have to take legal action. 

While I sympathize with you and it is really terrible customer service, you have no leg to stand on in terms of legal action. Their warranty terms which you must've agreed to when making the purchase state "*The customer is responsible for shipping costs to Build Redux after 60 days of original delivery."

 

It is a terrible warranty, but they were upfront about it so there's no legal recourse here.

 

I however agree that LTT should maybe re-think their sponsorship. That kind of warranty is shady at best and I'm sure that line was buried in the terms when making the purchase since companies know 99.9% of people do not read the terms.

[obat2553]

2 hours ago, RunnerUp said:

While I sympathize with you and it is really terrible customer service, you have no leg to stand on in terms of legal action. Their warranty terms which you must've agreed to when making the purchase state "*The customer is responsible for shipping costs to Build Redux after 60 days of original delivery."

 

It is a terrible warranty, but they were upfront about it so there's no legal recourse here.

 

I however agree that LTT should maybe re-think their sponsorship. That kind of warranty is shady at best and I'm sure that line was buried in the terms when making the purchase since companies know 99.9% of people do not read the terms.

i did read the terms and im not trying to get out of paying for shipping costs, im trying to get them to honor the warraty which is a legaly binding contract. 

[chilinux]

It is odd with how loud LTT was regarding Anker/Eufy that they would then move on to Keeper as a sponsor.  The two companies now both have a past track record of company behavior that seem extremely similar.

 

Even while Keeper's lawyers was trying to keep Ars Technica's Dan Goodin from ever reporting on Keeper security issues ever again, another security journalist Zack Whittaker @zackwhittaker was bold enough to continue reporting.  The types of things he found was:
 

* A motion to dismiss the lawsuit because it violated California's law again Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP):
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4417587-Keeper-v-Goodin-reply-for-motion-to-dismiss

* Keeper left their AWS S3 bucket *FULLY* open to the public to read and *write* to:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/password-manager-maker-keeper-hit-by-another-security-snafu/

 

* Keeper overstated their claims of providing "zero-trust":
https://www.threatshub.org/blog/a-bug-in-keeper-password-manager-leads-to-sparring-over-zero-knowledge-claim/

 

Each of these seem like that last things you would want to be the behavior of a company you are entrust your *passwords* for storage!!

 

The responses to these on Keeper's blog has been to downplay/spin the same way Anker/Eufy did about so-called end to end encryption.

It seems either LTT isn't fully vetting the history of behavior of companies that sponsor them or there might be some "hope" that given enough time LTT will just quietly accept Anker/Eufy back.  Is LTT available to help in whitewashing past behavior for sponsors?

 

Once you become aware a "security" company will use lawyers to try to silence security researchers and journalist, it becomes less clear if lack of recent reports really means the product is free of known vulnerabilities or if the company lawyers just has gotten better at keeping silent the discussion.

 

At no point does it seem like Keeper "Security" will ever be open to the same level of open review and discussion that bitwarden password manager does (which is open source).  Rather Keeper likes to point out it continues to have certifications such as SOC 2 just like it did at the time Zack Whittaker reported on known issues with Keeper.  However, unlike AWS, I can't find a place to download the actual results of the SOC 2 audits.