After we wrote last week about DeepCool's sanctioned cooling products being sold on Amazon under the Shaking Tank name (with lightly blurred DeepCool logos), it became clear that the Amazon seller was also hawking products from competing companies, most notably Cooler Master, as pointed out by YouTuber Greg Salazar, who broke the story originally.
Dug a bit deeper and found several instances of Amazon storefronts blurring brand logos and selling products under the "Shaking Tank" name. This doesn't appear to be Deepcool-specific, and is likely a reseller's way of circumventing sanctions in order to offload banned inventory. pic.twitter.com/YJOdj0E14JAugust 23, 2024
With that revelation, it was already pretty clear that DeepCool (sanctioned in June for selling products to two Russian companies supporting the war against Ukraine) was not directly involved in the rebranding of its products, or trying to get around U.S. sanctions to sell a few of its coolers here.
But as the company is already dealing with major fallout over the above sanctions, a representative reached out to us to clarify that it was not involved in the Saking Tank shenanigans on Amazon, and it has since taken direct action with the seller to make sure its products are no longer offered.
"It was not a DeepCool official action at all," a company representative wrote via email. "We have taken immediate action to investigate through our distribution channel and found it was one of our Chinese distributors who has been selling DeepCool products with blurred logo and brand name changed."
The DeepCool representative states that the distributor violated their contract, is being penalized, and has been ordered to remove the company's products from its overseas sales platform. As of this writing, it appears that there are no longer any renamed DeepCool products available on the seller's page. The blurred-out Cooler Master products seem to have been removed as well, though there are still several clearly labeled products from Cooler Master, Coolleo, and Juishark available via the Shaking Tank page on Amazon.
As DeepCool's representative points out, the presence of the above products on the Shaking Tank seller page "also proves… that there's no way we renamed ourselves to merchandise competitors' products."
This makes sense both from a logical and a business standpoint. It's unlikely that the small amount of profit the company could make from selling a few coolers from a third-party Amazon seller would be worth further fallout in the U.S.-aligned countries where its products are still available, or jeopardizing its presumed long-term hopes to re-enter the U.S. market.
