Jeremy

@elvenVAL

SJSU Esports Overwatch Captain // ex Apex Legends/Valorant player

Joined October 2015

165 Following

177 Followers

2.6K Posts

Jeremy @elvenVAL

about 3 years ago

tl;dr a couple UGC League admins scammed Vite Ramen out of $3,000+ worth of orders and tried the whole time to hide it. Pretty nasty stuff

Vite Ramen - Noodtrient Protein Ramen 🍜

@ViteRamen

about 3 years ago

Recently, we discovered $3,074.84 in fraudulent orders, and found that our kindness was being taken advantage of by people we’ve worked with for years. As a company, we have always tried to compensate fairly and on time, and to work with our partners on everything we can. We practice kindness first, second, and third, and we do our best to support communities we love simply for the sake of supporting them, without expecting anything in return. The Overwatch competitive scene is one of those communities, and it’s been one that we’ve supported fondly for a long time. In fact, we still do, even if it’s not to the extent we used to. Ultimately it’s not even remotely close to breakeven, and we can only lose so much money at a time, but we firmly believe that what investment we CAN afford has always been worth it. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that this kindness was taken advantage of recently by a group we trusted. - When we discovered the problem orders, Shopify automatically marked them as potentially fraudulent, for two reasons: One, they were absolutely gigantic orders. Each order had a minimum value of $800. On its own, this isn’t the most unusual situation. There’s a guy in our database who has, for five years, ordered about $2,000 in Garlic Pork Tonkotsu every three months, or enough to have 3 packs of it a day. He’s also not the only one. However, what started the alarm bell in our heads was the second reason why it was marked as potentially fraudulent: these orders were all paid COMPLETELY by gift cards. And of course, it wasn’t just one order. It wasn’t even just two. It was FOUR ORDERS, all worth hundreds of dollars apiece, and all paid entirely using gift card balance. When we looked into the details, there seemed to be some poor attempts at concealing it as well. Every order had come from a different account... all of which used variations of the same name. Clearly, whoever had started these transactions knew it was something that they weren’t supposed to be doing. Notably…they all used the UGC code too. UGC is an Overwatch community tournament partner we’ve been working with for many years. This is very important later on, for two separate reasons. (Notably, this is UGC League, not UGC Events. They're two separate organizations.) See, we’ve been working with T2 teams, communities, and tournaments for a very long time. We issue gift cards, set up affiliate earnings, and even award straight cash prizes for tournaments. We offer all the other support we can as well in non-monetary ways, from graphic design to tournament organization to run-of-the-mill tasks that we handle just to take some extras off our partners’ plates. When our gift cards are issued, they are held sometimes by the tournament admins in escrow to distribute to their rightful owners once the tournament is completed. They do not belong to the tournament organizers. The organizers act as an agent, a go-between in our stead, especially when community tournaments with many different tiers may have hundreds of participants with an equally large scale of payouts and prizes. We also encourage the affiliate code to be used, as then we can share the profits with partners, making it a win-win for everyone involved. This does, however, necessitate that there’s a net positive flow of cash… Which, as you might suspect, gift cards don’t do, since there’s no real payment involved. Gift cards, especially the ones we generate for tournaments, are essentially just big discounts. These gigantic orders all used gift cards ($0 real income), all used the UGC affiliate code (10% discount), and all had the affiliate earnings paid out as well (10% of the gross value of the order before discounts). Shopify keeps good records of where and who uses gift cards, and so we were able to backtrack on the gift card generations and usages. Imagine our surprise when we found out that these gift cards, meant to be distributed and used by tournament winners, were instead being consolidated and then USED IN BULK BY THE TOURNAMENT ADMINS OF UGC instead. The massive number of gift cards redeemed didn’t even account for all of them, as we’ve issued thousands and thousands of dollars of gift cards over the years to support the community tournament scene. We discovered that a spreadsheet we had previously used to distribute these gift cards was being openly shared by UGC admins between each other. We were kind. We were generous. And we were completely taken advantage of. Each of these gift card orders meant that we would be incurring 100% of the cost of materials, labor, rent, shipping, and everything else consumed in the making of these massive ramen orders. On top of that, because the code was used, they would also receive affiliate earnings as well. You can instantly see why someone might want to do this, as well as conceal their tracks Maybe it was an innocent mistake somehow. Who knows? Stranger things have happened. But when I went to inquire about the strange transactions, all the secrets spilled out. UGC knew about this situation the entire time, and were just hoping we wouldn’t notice. At any point in time, they could’ve come forward about it, asked about admin discounts, about if we could send ramen for promos for free (and we do this, a lot, all the time), or anything of the like. Instead, they chose to take advantage of our kindness, and to try and scam their way to ramen instead. Xiuna made the orders. Snowblind told him it was okay to use the gift cards, concealed it, and made all of UGC culpable in this. We are obviously canceling these orders and officially terminating our relationship with UGC. We’re a small business. We are constantly struggling to survive, especially during these hellish past years that have taken down other, much more experienced, much more established businesses. I am stressed. I am burnt out. I am keeping it all together still, despite everything. For a long-term industry partner we thought we could trust to do something like this…that hurts. It enrages me. There is nothing in this world that disgusts me more than taking advantage of someone’s kindness, and we will be pursuing the full weight of consequences that this action deserves. If you are kind, open, communicative, and empathic, we will always be able to find a solution that works for both of us. Don’t resort to things like this. -Tim, CEO/Founder Vite Kitchens