I think I can provide some clarity for everyone here. The “accusation” of discrediting us was how this all started.
Believe this or not, I won’t be going back and forth to try to convince anyone.
Let’s just put it all out there….
A little background on this whole situation:
“Axle” and I worked closely together on a past operation that also got removed from SST due to an internal dispute. I won’t go into detail on this because quite frankly, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll try to refrain from airing out the dirty laundry… The only real important takeaways:
1. After the sources removal, we found that there were a number of cross contaminated products that he was in charge of brewing (thanks to a customers testing, which led us to test everything that he supposedly already had tested).
2. Going our separate ways with a serious question about his character.
We rebranded on SST (with permission from the mods), and so did he. He moved to a different state to operate (with a lot of stolen funds and raws, but that’s beside the point) and we got word of his whereabouts through mutuals (remember this fact, it’ll be important later)…
We were told to ignore him and keep it civil, and we obliged. We remained focused on rebuilding our new brand. We never hid any of this from the community and were transparent about it from the jump. He cannot say the same.. he denied any involvement in the past operation after some speculation from a few members, which makes sense considering he would’ve been attacked for the cross contamination fiasco. Regardless, it seemed as though both of us could mutually exist and were seemingly finding success on our own endeavors.
One day, we get an email from a “customer” stating that they got their pack in the mail and there were floaters in both of his vials. This was the first clue that raised our suspicion because he ordered Test E & Mast E… We immediately started to thoroughly check all vials for floaters under a black light. All were clean. We didn’t understand how every vial in front of us could be clean, and a customer received two vials that had booger sized floaters in them. So I started to look into it a bit more…
First, I noticed that the customer who made the post on the forum had a brand new account created just days earlier… okay, not really out of the ordinary, right… right?
I started scrolling through our email thread and found a few more things that tipped me off. For one, our old business partner (brewer) had a very specific style of typing (not to be confused with whoever is now running the Axle account). I mean terrible grammar, random capitalization of letters, spacing his punctuation.. Now, I know this may seem like a pretty small, unimportant detail… but honestly, the typing was so familiar. Trust me, I know it sounds dumb… but immediately, my senses were tingling.
This lead me to check the address for the order and it just so happened to be the same city that he moved to….
Now I know I’m definitely not trippin…
I told my current partner about this and he made a call, 20 minutes later we had confirmation that his car was outside of that address, with out of state plates from (you guessed it) the same state we both used to operate out of. Bingo. Case closed in our book. This was 100% a sabotage attempt by our old brewer.
And if anyone has any doubts that our old brewer is connected to Axle, I’d be willing to bet any amount of money that I know where every single customers pack was shipped from.. I’m sure that would just be a coincidence though, right?
Not to mention, that “customer” went completely radio silent after we called all of this out. If that was a real customer, why would he not email back denying all of this and call us insane?
I passed this information along to the mods, who started a thorough investigation. At this point, we undoubtedly knew that it was him, but obviously they weren’t just going to take our word for it. They started looking into the IP addresses and not only did they connect them to the account who complained of floaters, but (according to mods) “over a dozen other shill accounts”. Their attempt to destroy our reputation was ultimately their downfall on SST, because they likely would’ve gotten away with all the shill accounts had they not tried to tarnish our image.
Trying to jump to a new forum and deny all of this is truly laughable. I was just going to ignore it and move forward but seeing you come on here and lie about it is kind of frustrating. You all know as well as we do, reputation and trust means everything in this business. If we hadn’t of played detective and found this out, we would be finished. Boosting up yourself is one thing… but trying to destroy our reputation is a lot worse. That was extremely low and like others have said, you should own up to it.
