Artesian builds: the UK edition

[Sheepy the Welshman]

Hey all, new to the forums but not to watching LTT and tech quickie. If this is the wrong sub I apologise I’ll put it in the correct one.

 

I'm posting here, there and everywhere. So that people in the UK/Europe can hopefully take heed of my experience with a company called fierce PC and avoid them.

 

I’ll be presenting everything as a timeline of events.

 

 

8/01/2023 --- i see that fierce PC is starting up a subscription based service. where you can get discounts on components at their store along with entry to a giveaway for £5.99 

 

10/01/2023 --- i sign up to the subscription service as i needed to get some components anyway for a build I was doing and thought well maybe I’ll save a little. upon signing up the system takes my money but keeps generating an error message for an email link that i never receive.

 

13/01/2023 ---- i send an email to their support email address and receive no response

 

from here until the response from both the director of the company and the customer service team i chalk the entire thing up as a loss and keep an eye open to make sure no further withdrawals from my bank account are made.

 

02/02/2023 --- i receive an email from their customer service team that they are essentially taking the subscription service offline but the giveaway will go ahead and i will receive a refund of the amounts i paid. (note i  did not receive a refund)

later on in day i received an email from paul simcock the director of the company

stating i had won the giveaway and that the fierce nation system was "inundated with issues" and asked me to attend the store/warehouse for an interview and to collect the prize.

This begins a back and forth email chain where I offer some advice on doing wave alpha and beta testing and give feedback on. Some ideas they had for the idea behind the subscription service.

 

02/03/2023 --From this point i heard nothing. no response to emails the companies telephone lines go straight to out-of-hours messages (which is still the case as i write this)

 

13/03/2023 -- at this point I fear I'd been in the best case lied to by a company and at a worst case scammed by a spear phishing campaign. so i start doing some some digging. 

the fierce nation advertisements remain up on twitter but the webpages taken down(to be expected with the issues) but all but one mention of the giveaway seemed to have been deleted. 

 

 

 

after all this and numerous attempts to contact them its like they ghosted. 

i do not think they are trying to kill the company as on march 6th paul simcock created another company called  "fierce academy" which he talked about in the emails.

 

further to the above the website is still receiving regular updates. So internally they seem to be operating as normal. 
 

If you made it this far. Thanks for reading and please don’t set fire to your money by sending it to them

 

 

 

[WnDTech]

Definitely looks and sounds a little odd that's for sure.

 

I've never used them personally as I build my own PC's but it's good to raise awareness of companies that don't appear to be great.

 

To make an informed opinion however there isn't that much information to go on from what you have put above when you actually lay it all out.

 

My advice would be to check out their twitter pages and see what's going on and what others are saying, and ask others for their experiences too.

 

 

[Neftex]

so let me get this straight, the director told you to come pick up your pc, you didnt go and started telling them how to do their job better?