It's a classic hustle, as old as time itself.
The scammer stakes out a parking lot, often at an electronics retailer, and then waits for their victim.
In this case, an LTT viewer from Florida.
Next comes the story. The details vary, but the structure is usually pretty similar.
Hey, we kind of over-respect for this super rich client guy, and we bought too many speakers,
and now our boss is saying to just get rid of him because it'd be too expensive to keep him around,
thinking I could give him to you for a pretty good price.
They're legit. The victim is suspicious, but, I mean, they look alright, and who doesn't want a great deal?
There's just one small problem. They sound like ass!
But our victim did all of his basic due diligence.
So how did this happen? To find out, we offered to help a brother out by buying the speakers off of him at the price that we paid
so we can blow the freaking lid off of this thing.
Because, as it turns out, this classic scam has learned a lot of new tricks that could bamboozle even a fairly savvy shopper.
We're going to show you exactly how it works, show you how to avoid it,
and we're going to dive into the surprisingly organized network of shady retailers and manufacturers who enable these fraudsters.
That is, assuming that I haven't been scammed myself by Dr. Erad here.
I don't know for sure that there are even speakers in here. I mean, it could be packed with anything.
It could be packed with something nobody wants, like this segway, to our sponsor.
From five, six feet away, not going to lie, this is pretty darn convincing looking.
I mean, even the branding, if you told me that Elysian Audio was a thing, I'd be like,
okay, with that said, it's not that hard to make up a fancy sounding brand.
For example, Calise, Ceboire, Estee.
Those sound like luxury brands, but as it turns out, they're just French-Canadian curse words.
The real trick that these guys pull though is repurposing real names from reputable brands that are in a similar product category.
Elysian is a particularly tricky one because it is the name of a well-regarded line of speakers from real manufacturer Warfdale.
It just isn't these.
What this allows our scam speakers to do is sit alongside reputable speakers in Google searches
without our scammers having to create a super convincing knockoff of an exact product.
We'll talk more about the online strategy later though. For now, let's take a closer look at what we bought and see if we can catch any hints on the packaging itself.
Well, here's one that stands out to me. You can't have Adam a single speaker system that can do 9.1, 7.2, and 5.1 sound.
Yeah, 7.2 is kind of a crazy one. You can downmix, but also it's six pieces.
So that's 1, 2, 3, that's five. That's 5.1.
But that has ten pieces on the box.
I think these are single speakers and they turn, but I still don't think that makes it 7.1.
But that also definitely doesn't make it 5.1.
Yeah, I don't really know. I'm thinking that maybe how they market soundbars these days or letting them get away with it.
Because you buy a soundbar and it says like 11.1.1 or whatever.
Personally, I prefer audio return channel to giant wooden boat full of animals.
And you know what else seems legit? It's industrial grade certified for outdoor use.
Yeah, you can even wireless connect. And there's more stuff like that. Active voice amp, singles out dialogue.
That sounds legit. Hi-res audio signal, wait, via internet.
Okay, sorry, that wasn't what.
Whether the details are on purpose or not, I feel like the giant blocks of text are a huge part of the strategy.
Because who's going to read all of that? Yeah, right?
And even, this is such a shallow thing.
Even something as simple as having foil on the packaging makes it look more premium.
It is interesting what details they do get, correct?
Like I was not going to expect that they'd have their own custom straps.
Yeah, right? That makes it seem more legit.
And tape, the tape even says Elysian on it.
It's reassuring. These make it think, it makes it look heavy.
Oh yeah, is it heavy? Ah, I mean it's got a bit of weight to it.
I guess. For six or nine or eleven drivers though.
And like look at how they've scaled the subwoofer in this picture on the front.
To me, it doesn't look like there would be enough space for five other speakers and the subwoofer in here.
Right. That subwoofer is not very big, is it?
No, I don't think any of this is very big at all. They even have disclaimers on the box.
Like, why would a scammer who's trying to convince you that it's the best thing ever
have to have a disclaimer about, you know, the images and model number being subject to change?
Oh, this is a really important part of the scam though.
MSRP, $3,000.
While printed pricing on the box is common for some products, for speakers, it's highly unusual.
Even more so for high-end audio where the speakers are typically sold through approved dealer networks
with a, if you have to ask, you can't afford it, approach to pricing.
Sorry, did you see this? Wall-mountable stethoscope symbol.
Okay, we could probably do this all day.
So then, what do these guys say when you go, well, I've never heard of a lease in audio
or you point out some of the weirdness on the box? Well, they have an answer for all of that.
They might say something like, oh yeah, they're a boutique brand from overseas, huge in Italy.
And, you know, these are sold by high-end audio installers, so the packaging isn't really meant for retail,
so they don't pay too much attention to it. And when you ask, well, how can you be selling it so cheap if it's so boutique and so high-end?
You'll usually get some kind of variant of...
Well, you gotta understand, they mark these things up like crazy because all the rich people are buying them.
We buy them wholesale. These aren't even close to $3,000.
They're more like, maybe a grand? So you're not even losing that much selling it to me then?
No. I'm practically talking myself into it.
And that really is the most devious kind of lie, the kind that is built on a kernel of truth.
High-end audio does have obscene markups, and it does rely on a network of approved dealers and installers
who do deal in brands that the typical consumer has never heard of.
And the scammers will go to sometimes great lengths to match the image of a legitimate installer.
They'll rent a nice-looking van, they'll wear polo shirts with matching company logos,
and they'll even obtain real business licenses and phone numbers.
Which they'll be happy to show you since they aren't gonna exist in a week.
So, okay, you're still a little suspicious.
So you decide to scan the QR code on the box and check out the manufacturer,
because some guy in a parking lot could lie to you, but the manufacturer couldn't.
They've never done that. And that is where this classic ruse glows up for the 21st century.
That looks pretty legit, honestly.
Here's the one that they're offering me, the Smart Series Model 2.
The satellite speakers have a 12-inch subwoofer.
Yeah, that's wrong. They also have a QLED.
Yeah. For those of you who don't know, it's display technology.
Not anything to do with your sound.
But here's some reviews. The best product I've bought since buying my first CD player as a teen.
I mean, that sounds reasonably credible. The problem I have with this product is my husband not wanting to leave the house.
That's a very good hook. Quotes that sound too good are a classic tell for fake reviews.
That's why on LTT Store, we leave people's unedited reviews up on the site.
Like for the RGB T-shirt that I'm wearing that's rated 4.62 out of 5.
I don't like the RGB shirts because of the rough itchy feel against my skin.
See? Not everyone loves them. Oh, this is smart.
Where to buy slash store locator, shut up.
It's just a link to Best Buy. And the Elysian Model 2s that we covered today are just one example of this.
These same units can be found under other names like MRX, Valencia VX300 Home Theater,
or Synchrony B600, all of which were stolen from legitimate home theater companies.
MRX is aligned from Anthem, Synchrony is aligned by PSB,
and Valencia is the brand of seeding that I use in my theater room at home.
And making this whole web of lies more confusing is the entire network of fake review websites
that you will often find linked from these manufacturers.
And while Elysian doesn't specifically link to those,
when you Google search Elysian Audio Home Theater Review, the featured snippet is from one of those scam review sites.
WeReviewElectronics.com, 10 out of 10.
And to make things worse, the Gemini summary underneath
gives information that is correct if you are looking for Warfdale Elysian speakers,
but just serves to add to the legitimacy of the snippet.
Unfortunately, thanks to the power of AI,
I'm a CEO in a porcelain spa. Yes, yes, yes, that's me.
Building sites and writing convincing enough reviews has become both cheap and super easy.
In just a couple of weeks that we've been working on this video, we've seen several of these networks of sites pop up and disappear
or switch over to new product categories.
And you're not going to have the kind of time that we have to go through all of this.
Before you get a chance to ask too many questions, they're going to start putting formal pressure on you.
Hey, look, security, they're going to kick us out here, you know, and I got to get back to work.
My next client, he's a dog podiatrist, and if he can't clip the nails without the background music,
and you don't want the dogs to suffer, do you? No.
So, do you want them or not?
So, you go to the nearest ATM, which they conveniently have perfect directions for,
and you buy them. I mean, hey, even if they're not actually top of the line,
they're brand new. They can't be that bad, right?
Right? They even got like a piece, oh, I thought that was printing on the styrofoam.
Even the documentation, it comes in a little bag.
Are you not supposed to figure out it's a scam until you actually plug them in?
Like, even the packaging itself is pretty convincing.
Yeah, I mean, the longer they have before you realize that you screwed them over,
the further away they can get, right? Oh, boy.
They're so small. Also, didn't they say wireless satellite speakers?
Yes. Oh, no, that was wireless satellite speaker subwoofer, right?
Can I open this or do you want to leave it mint for resale?
Shut up. I'm impressed they have removable drills, though.
I'm surprised they didn't keep them on. Look at all the glue.
That's how they seal in the goodness.
This is the single cheapest-feeling HDMI cable that I have ever encountered.
Does that even seem like it has enough girth for all the conductors?
HDMI 0.5.
Okay, let's get the center channel.
What happened in here? Look, it's all scratched up.
Oh, wow. You can just see straight into it.
Look, you can see wires in the back. Also, this is the worst wall-mounting mechanism I think I've ever seen.
You have to fix the location of the speaker from the back,
then screw it into the wall.
No more adjustment for you. I wonder if everyone is in on it.
Like, do you think the manufacturer of these knows that they're a scam?
They must be. There's no reason to make this junk unless you're trying to rip people off, right?
Well, I mean, if they sold it at the actual price of it, then it's not really a rip-off.
I mean, the subwoofer is actually a pretty decent size.
Is that actually all of the speakers? All of the speakers fit into the top third.
That answers the mystery of whether it's 5.1 or 7.2 or 9.1.
At this point, I'm thinking it's stereo.
It really does raise the question, though.
If they know it's a scam, why bother making them work at all?
Do you think they're just not going to work? They clearly have drivers in them.
They clearly have wiring in them. I mean, I guess maybe it's like, you can keep scamming down the chain.
Also, some people just don't know better. Some people might have their crap TV, and that's all the audio that they knew,
and then they decided to splurge or get a Christmas gift.
And this works, right? It starts playing and maybe it is just louder.
Are we 100% sure it's not a computer?
Dude, you got Adele. There's peels on the stickers, but the stickers themselves are just paper stickers.
What a weird attention to detail.
I guess the sticker approach to branding makes it pretty easy for them
to have all those different names for it. Oh, wow.
Oh, buddy, this is going to suck.
That's not 12 inches.
I told my wife that's 12 inches. Yeah, she didn't believe you either.
I mean, this is 12 inches. Yeah, I was going to say this is like something,
but what a scam to put the speaker cover and make it way bigger than the driver.
Let's plug it in. Wait, where's the amp?
It isn't a home theater in a box.
There's no amp. We did get an AV receiver. Well, how can it be Bluetooth anything?
Is there any cables? There's no cables? Dude, it's way more bulls*** than even we thought.
I should have opened this. How can you have 2600 watts when you don't have an amp at all?
There's no 5.8G. I even knew I was getting scammed, and I still feel ripped off.
Well, I guess we did an AV receiver and a bunch of speaker wire.
BRB.
What are the odds that you think that this one won't even turn on?
That it's only going to power the top? I think it'll power both of them.
Want a bit? No. We might be the first people who have bought these and actually bothered to set them all the way up.
You know? Is this big fat speaker wire even going to fit in the back of these?
No, we got too high of a gauge. I feel like when you don't buy cheap enough stuff.
Okay, theoretically we have ARC, so...
Okay, that's progress. If I didn't make any noise, we'll get to that later.
Andrew, what are you doing? You know, you're struggling with the whole had a clamp in place thing, so...
This is how we're mounting the speaker. Adam, you were right.
The top is a speaker and the bottom is not.
That's pathetic. I popped out the speaker.
Quote-unquote speaker. It's just a metal plate and you can see the back of the driver in there.
Again, why bother? Just glue in the speaker grill. Yeah, just put a cosmetic grill on it and don't even bother with the paper cone.
I've encountered this kind of thing before where it's like, remember those fake GPUs?
Yeah. Where they put a bunch of work into designing a cooler and a shroud and doing injection molding
and why bother? Why not just ship a piece of paper?
I mean, if somebody knows, please let us know in the comments.
Or maybe we're just helping them do their scam better. They have mounting points for if you want to do a metal plate.
I'll help you do two. These ones are just stickers though.
They are. Credit where credit's due. They cheaped out there and that was pretty smart.
Why would you angle the whole speaker? We can just do this.
Because they're surrounds. They go on this side of... Okay.
Here we go. Oh, is this right side up?
Oh, it's upside down. Okay. I mean, who can tell anyway, right?
They're so small. I know. They look like little lab tech desktop computer speakers from the 90s.
See now, I unboxed these an hour ago.
So I knew better than to have high expectations. But somehow all the work that I had put into getting it working made me feel like, yeah,
it should be... We like earned a payoff. Yeah.
This part sounds okay. This is...
Oh my God. Okay. Hold on.
Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
Okay. They're better.
They're deeper. Yeah.
By like a country mile. Admittedly, it was a pretty nice TV.
Okay. It's a high-sense canvas. Yeah.
High-end TV. Pretty decent TV. But still.
There are like $99 sound bars on the market from legitimate brands that sound better.
That include an amplifier and actually have Bluetooth.
Yeah. It's insulting. It's bad.
I really want to hear this subwoofer. We've got to get this operational.
The subwoofer is a pre-out. It expects an amplified subwoofer, obviously.
Yeah. Where the hell are we going to find an amp for that right now?
We have an SVS. Well, no, no. I want to use this subwoofer.
An amp that we can... No, an amp that we can shove in the middle. Oh my God.
Oh, this is so stupid. Reese, you might have to go look for...
Maybe you're going to be on a hunt. You know what?
I think it'd be faster to just plug one of these in.
Let's find out if the subwoofer actually even works before we put a bunch more work into
trying to amplify it.
Okay. It works.
It does sound bad. Yeah.
But it's so much better than I expected.
It's just a volume game, right? Like this is like what, a five-inch driver maybe?
Four. Maybe five. That's a big four.
That's what I tell my life I have.
We got all the speakers working and now I brought a couple of friends here.
To enjoy them. But first we're going to set ourselves a bass line.
We're going to listen to the Hisense Canvas TV.
Is this known for having a good TV speaker? No.
Fantastic. I just, you know, but like you think you're buying the home theater.
You got to hear what you're upgrading. You're right. You're right.
You know what? For TV speakers, that's not bad. It's not bad.
No bass. Yeah, but it's a TV speaker.
It's a little bit bright, but not bad. It would be fine for dialogue.
Like for people that are just watching TV shows and need to hear what people say.
It's fine. Okay. It's fine.
Now we're going to pull up the Elysian model too.
Okay. The funny thing is that so we couldn't get the subwoofer running because it's supposed
to be a passive, it's a passive subwoofer, which doesn't really exist nowadays.
Everything, all yours. So we had to, what we did is that we got, we pulled out of another subwoofer, the amp.
That was the only way we could get it powered because we didn't find an AV receiver that
had a passive. Okay. That is so unbalanced.
Believe it or not, these speakers, these speakers here aren't very big.
You don't say. And so there's kind of a big dip in the mids.
Yeah. It's weird that they look so much like the Bose Acoustamatic speakers.
I bought a pair. I used pair in like 2008.
That makes sense because a lot of what they're trying to do is associate themselves with
as many ideas of like goodness as possible.
How much did you pay for this? I paid $500.
Even that price is ridiculously busted.
Hang on, did we pay him that much to get them? We paid the guy back.
So we got scammed is what you're saying. We took the scam, we said double it and pass it to the next one.
We're going to sell for a thousand bucks. 500 bucks, you can get like a pretty okay home theater in a box for Best Buy.
You can get like a decent soundbar. It's not like a really decent soundbar.
It's not the best value in the whole world, but it's infinitely better than this.
Don't buy speakers for my guy in a parking lot. On Alibaba, when you search 5.1 Home Theater,
a system much like the one that we purchased will show up in the first two rows of results.
$128 is set. And here's the really crazy thing.
If you order enough of them, the deal only gets better.
For the shockingly low price of $56,500,
you can get 500 home theater setups complete with a custom fake logo and box design.
And that might be a lot for a single scammer, but if you're a shady supplier, you order in bulk and then sell them off a pallet at a time
to your scummy friends for maybe a couple hundred bucks a pop to cover your storage and shipping costs.
And then everyone else, well, they just have to sell them for more than $200,
which when you're talking about a luxury 5.1 Home Theater system,
that's probably not that hard to do. And by probably, I mean definitely.
I mean it obviously works because when you dig into it,
you find these scams everywhere, both in person and on online marketplaces like Facebook and eBay.
And it's not just speakers. It's across a variety of product categories, notably projectors and soundbars.
Bottom line is if you've been scammed, I know it can be really embarrassing.
He knows it can be embarrassing, but please report it.
70% of victims never report the scams that they're victims of.
And if you don't report it, well, that just lets them win.
Lastly, even when you do report the scams, only 4% of victims are estimated to recover their losses.
But by talking about it, we can at least help prevent future losses.
So send this video to your family members. Have open, honest conversations about security.
It's important. It's so important that I didn't even come up with a segue to our sponsor.
You guys enjoyed this video. Why don't you check out the one where we looked at audiophile snake oil with Dan and our friend Dank Pods.
I got ripped off that time too. That was really funny because I got to choose all the pieces too.