I officially joined PTDS and PGB on 6 February 2024.
The first few weeks were a blur, mostly me finding my way around Discord, replying to the wrong threads by accident, getting told off for referring to human use, and being asked to move “long conversations” into DMs.
At that point the landscape felt smaller. There was PTDS, PGB, the Reta server, Winty’s, a pen server I somehow ended up in despite not using pens myself (that’s another story), and EGB, which was sold to me as a server that also offered “luxury items” (news to me).
But one thing I remember clearly:
The online sex toy shop.
I started seeing screenshots of it in the PGB channel. At the time, I didn’t really understand why it was there and I definitely didn’t dare ask. I filed it away as another “grey market oddity” and carried on.
Until I joined my first group buy.
29 February 2024: T30
When it came time to do my first PGB group buy, 29 February 2024, for T30, I clicked the link.
And suddenly it all made sense.
It took me to an online sex toy website.
My first time ever on one of those… and also the exact moment I thought:
Right. Now I’ve truly made it into grey. This is how it actually operates in the real world.
We were given instructions on which “toys” to order depending on what we were buying. I ordered the “T30.”
Payment was through PayPal, which was convenient, and at checkout I paid $464 if I remember correctly, which makes me wince now, considering current T30 prices are just over $100.
Then I looked at my PayPal order summary.
Apparently I had ordered a:
“Massive whip and deluxe rose.”
That made me laugh, even though I was also slightly mortified to have those words sitting in my purchase history.
It was funny. Surreal, even. Seeing something so ridiculous attached to what was actually a peptide order.
But it also hit me in that moment:
This isn’t theory anymore.
This is real.
Months later, when I finally tried that T30, it was still disappointing. But at the time, I didn’t know that yet.
Two more buys
After that, I participated in two more group buys:
4 March, MOTS-C
14 March, R8
All routed through the same absurd “sex toy” storefront.
At the time, I had no idea that history was being made, because that R8 buy would end up being the last one XCE ever did, and the last of the OG PGB group buys.
Shortly after orders were placed and paid for, XCE went dark.
The Day XCE Went Down
On 27 March 2024, XCE disappeared.
None of us knew it at the time, but that moment would end up shaping the grey market community going forward.
I remember logging in early that morning and seeing a post saying the XCE website was down.
I immediately checked.
It was true, payments weren’t being accepted.
And just like that, the illusion cracked.
Because I’m in the UK, I was one of the first to see it. But within hours the news spread. People started reporting that emails and Telegram messages to Peter had not been responded to in days. There was also talk of other China peptide vendors going down.
Panic started to set in.
People mentally assessed their stock at home: Do I have enough?
They debated whether this was an exit scam, something temporary, or something even worse, a government shutdown.
They also started worrying about the active group buys:
Will they be refunded? Will anyone be left holding the bag?
My main worry was simpler and more personal:
I had only just found this world, and suddenly it felt like it was being taken away from me.
The pause
The next day, there was an announcement in the PGB server that future group buys would be paused.
The Tesamorelin GB was being refunded. The Reta had already been shipped out, which was a relief.
Then the conversation turned to the only question that matters in a community built on one dominant supply line:
Who replaces XCE?
Because XCE wasn’t just “a vendor.” There was a close relationship between XCE and PTDS (the independent testing server). Most of the products tested in PTDS at that time were from XCE, which is how XCE became so big in the first place.
(There’s more to come on that.)
It also forced people to confront something they didn’t want to admit:
Relying on one source only was a mistake.
There was life pre XCE , with XCE, and now we were entering life post-XCE.
The scramble for an XCE replacement
Almost immediately, attention turned to two smaller Discords that most people barely knew before XCE went dark, but which suddenly rose up in the vacuum:
Raven and Southern Dad, both known to be running a T15 group buy with testing included.
And this is where the character assassinations and smear campaigns started quietly planting seeds.
As soon as those two names were mentioned, one of the PTDS mods strongly advised against Southern Dad, saying he had sent out cease-and-desist letters to people he perceived as bullies or threats to his ecosystem.
At that stage, Raven was given a thumbs up. She’d had a difficult pen group buy but had done the right thing by her customers, so she was considered worth giving a try.
What’s interesting is how little anyone questioned the underlying story. No one asked why cease-and-desist letters were even part of the conversation. It was simply accepted as fact, and the decision crystallised:
Raven would be the next vendor for the T15.
At the same time, word on the street was that Tracy from QSC was taking advantage of newbies who didn’t know his less than celebrated history, and people were suspicious that QSC appeared with a new server right as XCE went dark.
The other two vendors in the running were HT and HYT. Someone even claimed HT’s tirz was the best they had ever tried.
(More on that to come too.)
And that’s when I realised the second big truth of the grey market:
A vendor doesn’t just “replace” another vendor.
A whole new power structure forms in the vacuum.
And once that starts, the real chaos begins.
Me and my “dear friend” Cora
After my disappointment with the XCE tirz, I had decided to try HT (Henan Tengmao) because someone had reported it to be very good.
So on 17 March, I contacted Cora, who had a profile pic of a young blonde girl. I was so naïve at that stage that I genuinely wondered why a non-Chinese woman was working for HT.
She called me “dear friend” and charged me $250 for a box of T10, including shipping and customs.
My experience with Cora is an episode in itself.
But suffice to say: I placed another panic order with her on 29 March, and a few days later I signed up to Raven’s T15 GB after being thoroughly reassured that she would take extra effort to ship the product to me in a decorative box, and that she’d had success shipping to Spain already.
No sooner had I placed the order than I started hearing warnings about Raven. I had no idea why at that stage, so I asked one of my longest standing and wisest friends for her opinion, and she reassured me.
Yet again, it was another example of how someone can go from hero to villain in a matter of days.
The XCE garage photo
A few days later, an advert for an XCE peptide sale appeared out of nowhere, with a picture of a garage containing XCE stock that was being sold off for more than the original price.
At that stage, I dismissed it as a scam, although it did turn out to be legit XCE stock from the USA XCE “warehouse”
Because that was the post-XCE era: everything was uncertain, everyone had a theory, and verification lagged miles behind the rumours.
To be continued
In the next episode, the scramble to replace XCE continues, and this is where things really start to unravel.
The R8/Reta group buy turned into one of the longest running GBs anyone had ever seen, so long it was eventually nicknamed the Ghost Reta Buy, and participants even had “ghost” added to their usernames.
The vendor replacement wars intensified.
And then there’s my personal side quest: my saga with Cora, “dear friend,” blonde profile pic, and all.
But that’s for next time.
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