Earlier quoted context omitted.
A side business I run supplied them with components in 2016. Based on what I shipped them I'd say they deployed some where in the neighborhood of 18,000 graphics cards in 2016 and they were supposedly ramping up to go even bigger in 2017. I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to t…
>I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them. Sounds like an interesting story here. How did you out him/her?
The business operates on a model where the customer pays a minimal fee, $100, to purchase a prototype of a new design but I retained the rights to the designs and did all the design, development, and testing on my own dime and then amortize those costs over the life of the product.
So one day they come to me and say they want to start manufacturing at a factory they've made a deal with in China and ask me to give them the design files free of charge. I told them that I wasn't going to just give them the companies IP for free because a lot of work went into developing it etc... but that we could discuss what an appropriate price was if they really were dead set on doing their own manufacturing.
There was some back and forth but their position was that they didn't think there was anything special about the product and the most they were willing to pay for access to the design files and a license to manufacture it in unlimited quantities was $100 per design. I pointed out a number of things that we did the most important of which was making sure the design and materials could safely handle the high current loads the boards had to withstand, etc...
Shortly after I refused their $100 offer as insultingly low I get an email from some guy purporting to be from eastern Europe and saying he was interested in purchasing 500 units. Before he would go through with the purchase he needed to confirm some technical details of the board design because he was "concerned his environment was very hot and dirty". He then went on to ask a list of questions including things like what are the number and thickness of the copper layers in the PCB. These were the exact reasons I had discussed with the Genesis guys as to why our designs had value. At that point I was 99% sure of what was going on. So I responded that we didn't give out those specifics but that we could send him a prototype to test and he never responded.
To satisfy my own curiosity a little while later I used a personal email address to send the guy a message saying that a friend had given me his name and asking if he still did hardware design because I needed some design work done for crypto-currency related projects. A day later I got a response that removed any remaining doubt about what was going on.