I bought the large version, so $45 plus $5 shipping. Which is an amazingly low cost for shipping from China. I used PayPal so no real worries. The name of the company collecting my payment is completely different from the vendor. But here is the rest of the story:
They billed me for over $40 for shipping! I went on the website and explained through their cumbersome customer service portal. I had to try a couple of times to get it to work so I figured I was out the shipping costs. But lo and behold they got back to me in a day and said they would refund the extra $35 shipping. And they did. And they did it again! I wasn’t sure what was going on but PayPal made 2 deposits of $35 to my bank account. So it only cost me 15 bucks overall.
Beck, what the heck does “dupe” mean today? I couldn’t find anything.
“Be one of the handful people on earth to possess all stable elements of the UNIVERSE.”
“Astonishing collection of 83 samples making up our universe”
“Our novel process makes collection safe to store and handle”
So a clear plastic rectangle with a single large decal stuck on the back with drawings of the elements is not at all what was advertised. I would have no hesitation in calling it a scam.
“Dupe” in the sense of being fooled comes from an old French term. At first, one was “a dupe,” as in the target for deception. That morphed into being duped.
In this sense, it has nothing to do with the word “duplicate.” You can say “dupe” as a shortened form to refer to a copy, but if you’re talking about being deceived, then the origin is French.
I just checked it again this morning. The ‘in stock’ # started at 3181 and quickly started counting up to over 3600 in like 30 seconds. I think they meant for the’ in stock’ number to start high upon page load and quickly start going down, as if they were selling like hotcakes, but some junior coder set it to increase by mistake. Oopsie.
Question is thus begged that hasn’t been answered here yet: how much would having one gram of each element then cost? Conversely, how much of each (same amount by weight, or volume if a gas) would you need to cost no more than say $100 US?
Let’s try to figure out how many elements are used in the production of this item.
The clingy sticker may be vinyl. Vinyl is composed of chloride and petroleum . Chloride is made from chlorine, iodine and oxygen. Petroleum includes carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.
The hard acrylic panel is essentially a long carbon-hydrogen-oxygen chain that doesn’t add any new chemistry
Ink pigments can be made from iron and copper compounds (red and blue) and cadmium sulfate (yellow).
Now we’re up to eight building blocks of the universe. I’m sure someone who actually knows chemistry can figure out how and why they played around with arsenic, mercury and some of the other nasty-but-stable elements.
The linked page reeks of scam if you know what to look for:
It’s very typical of a scam site that has been spun up quickly probably using Shopify - there’s a ‘last minute sale’ timer on the page that is supposed to make you think you are getting a bargain if you click fast (the timer resets to 10 minutes if you refresh the page, so… fake).
The badges for the payment methods in the section ‘guaranteed safe checkout’ would normally be individual links to the guarantee pages of card providers etc, but it’s just a static image - that’s another sign not to trust the site.
The page content has been badly shoe-horned into the right-hand column of the page - another common feature of shoddy bait and switch scam websites.
The checkout page is soliciting for tips (hilariously, ‘Show your support for the team at undefined’). I think this is an optional feature in Shopify, but the only sites I have seen that have it turned on, are scam sites.
Also on the checkout page there are badges saying it is a Google 5 star trusted store and has an A+ rating from BBB - I would have expected these badges to be links to those accreditations, if the accreditations were genuine - they’re not links - they’re just static images.
Also on the checkout page, there is a timer that says ‘Limited Stock! No worries, we have reserved your order. Your order is reserved for 10 : 00 minutes’ and this counts down, to try to hurry you along. If you allow this to count down to zero, nothing happens.
The product you received will have been dropshipped from Temu or AliExpress or somewhere; the images on the page are likely stolen from some other legitimate site where the actual product is being sold (probably for a higher price)
No endorsement, just noting it to compare and contrast.
Note the price: $289. Or, approximately 10x what the fake one cost.
I think OP got duped because they grossly underestimated what the genuine article should cost. “Too good to be true” doesn’t work so well of you don’t have a feel for what’s realistic and what’s “too good”.
ETA: the ripoffs actually used an altered version of Engineered Labs’ video. Other than removing the company’s name from the depicted sample display, it’s exactly the same. The stylized atom at the top of the plastic block is actually Engineered Labs’ logo.
I’m not convinced that it’s economically workable to capture, contain, and mount any amount of samples of all the stable elements for under $100. And especially not if you start to think of the spicier elements.
A gram would be way out of the question. I’m a small time silver guy and the wifey lives for gold. I would be happy if they had a couple of grains of the expensive elements. Stuff. Or even a reasonable fake. But not a decal.
You can use ICANN’s site to look up when a domain name was created. This one was created March 20, 2025. Stores like this are created every day. Don’t shop at places that were spun up a month ago!
There’s usually a business address on the site, in the footer. I think Shopify requires it. Usually I look them up and they are addresses for dilapidated and boarded up business fronts in the middle of a burnt out street. This one is actually using the address for a home in rural Kansas.
Go to the store’s About Us page. Copy a sentence in full and paste it in to a Google search, surrounded with quotes (to search the full sentence). You will find that there are several other scammy-looking sites with the same sentence on their About Us page. Because either the same people are spinning up these sites using the same templates, or they are just copying and pasting junk they find on other stores.
If you right-click on the item image and choose “copy image link” and get the URL for the image. You can then go to Google Lens by going to Google Images and clicking on the “Search by Image” icon to the right of the microphone. There, you can paste the image’s URL into the “paste image link” box to find all of the other places on the internet where the same picture is used. You might find the original source, or it might tip you off that there sure are a lot of scam sites trying to sell you this exact same scam product.
I know it seems like a hassle to go through all these steps to make sure a site isn’t scamming you, and you shouldn’t have to do all this. But it’s the wild west out there. EVERYTHING is a scam. If you’re trying to buy something off a site you’ve never heard of before, then it’s probably a scam. And if you don’t think it’s a scam, then look for the stuff that @Mangetout and I pointed out. Then you’ll know.
I hate “retail giants” as much as the next Liberal but sadly those are the safest places to purchase stuff these days. Even places like Wal Mart and Amazon and eBay have some very shady actors on their sites (because they have been welcomed in) but at least your payment info is secure and you get their “customer service.”
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discahvered