I often feel like the grey zone is a parallel life running alongside my normal everyday one. But lately, as my content seems to be spreading across more platforms than I’d initially planned, I’m starting to realise I spend more time there than I do in the real world.
Sometimes I still have to pinch myself that all of this is actually real. Yesterday was a perfect example of why.
I started the day with good intentions, working on my new article, Endotoxins in Grey Market Peptides. That lasted all of about five minutes.
Someone contacted me about a vendor I’d recently interviewed who was now asking for an extra 20% for a “customs hold” on a two-thousand-plus-dollar order. On top of that, he’d already paid another $225 just to split the packages so they’d supposedly clear customs more easily.
Now, customs issues aren’t new in this world. Vendors asking for reship contributions are not exactly unheard of either. But this is where people need to pay attention: those terms should be agreed before any money is sent, not invented halfway through.
What made this stand out even more was that, in my interview, the vendor had promised free reships. Now suddenly there was an extra 20% on top of the already paid $225. And when the buyer came back to tell me the vendor was now offering to cover just 10% of that 20% fee, my spidey instinct kicked in. Suddenly, this was sounding a lot like the shipping scams I’ve been writing about.
So I asked for a screenshot of the account he’d been dealing with.
There it was. A tiny dot at the end of the username.
For anyone new to this community, Discord is crawling with impersonators. Same name. Same profile picture. Just a small dot or hyphen in the username so the account can still be registered with Discord. Or Telegram, for that matter. They are literally everywhere, and they do not just impersonate vendors. I have several impersonators too.
What made this one more convincing was that the buyer had contacted her first, not the other way around. Which is exactly how people get caught.
So that was the next couple of hours gone, tracing it, confirming it, and warning everyone else.
No sooner had that finished than round two started.
Another buyer. This time with GHK-Cu. Slight colour variation, and more importantly, a possible hair in one of the vials of another kit.
The GHK-Cu colour? Not unusual.
The hair? Slightly more of a problem.
All the buyer wanted was a resolution for that one kit. Instead, he was told to return everything to a USA address for a full refund. Understandably, he wasn’t comfortable with that.
I reviewed his chat with the vendor. He was calm and respectful. The vendor, in my opinion, was not.
Because I have a good relationship with her, I offered to step in. I suggested a simple fix: refund the one affected kit and move on.
She wasn’t having any of it. None at all.
She called him a troublemaker. Said he made her angry.
And that’s usually where business decisions stop being business decisions.
I told her, quite plainly, that she was overreacting and letting emotion get in the way of business. After a few more rounds of trying to reason with her, but getting nowhere, I stopped pushing. I wasn’t there to win the argument. I was there to limit the damage.
Once I got confirmation from the vendor that the buyer would definitely be refunded, I passed that back to him with reassurance, and with an apology that I hadn’t been able to do more.
After that, I had a few hours to get back to my endotoxin article, interspersed with some social chatting.
And before I knew it, China had woken up.
Which meant: back into sorting-out mode.
That included helping a newer vendor with her server setup, chatting about her dog, and giving her a few TikTok suggestions.
Then I get sent a screenshot of a PepChat server by another vendor asking why there was a server that looked exactly like hers, and why I was apparently in it.
So now we were dealing with server-level impersonation.
We tried to track it, but by then she couldn’t find it again, or maybe it had already vanished. That one wasn’t solved. Just parked.
Somewhere in between all of that, I got another message from a vendor whose interview I’d posted that day, thanking me because she had already picked up new customers from it.
Which, to be fair, is exactly what my interviews are for.
Then, just as I was about to go to bed, I got another message.
“My friend recommended you…”
“He says you’re a very charming lady…”
They wanted to collaborate with me.
That part is actually pretty standard, so I gave my standard answer: I don’t collaborate, but I can offer an interview.
Then almost immediately, another message came in. This time about a COA.
And suddenly I was deep in a discussion about a product that had been tested multiple times, across different labs, with completely different results. There had even been a group chat set up to figure it all out.
Except when the vendor went back to it, the entire conversation had been deleted.
Gone.
Most likely, the other two people in the chat had fallen out in a big way, and one of them had deleted everything.
Eventually, I got to sleep.
Only to wake up early to a reply from the “collaboration” account.
And this is where I genuinely had to check if I was still asleep.
The company?
An adult product business.
Specialising in, let’s say, “adult things.”
My response was simple: Is this a joke?
It wasn’t.
Apparently, I’d been recommended because my influence and social media audience were considered “quite impressive.”
I considered it for about two seconds. Then I politely declined.
Although, I have to admit, “Notkrysiadultproductsgroup” does have a certain ring to it.
Maybe one for the future.
Or not.
And just to round things off, I got a message from a vendor I interviewed months ago. She had just landed two major clients. She thanked me warmly, then asked for my address so she could send me Chinese specialities, including two packets of hot pot base, and invited me to visit her factory.
Which might actually have been the most normal part of the day.
And that, apparently, is what passes for a fairly standard day in my parallel life.
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