Would not surprise me if that happened. It would be very underhanded and dirty, but there are plenty of these guys who are in it entirely for the money. There are others who really care, and I doubt they would do that. It seems the good guys are routinely being pushed out for the bad guys. It sucks because I want to support the ones who are good both as a vaper and a vendor. If one of them were found to be having their own clones produced it would destroy their authentics market. I am not sure if it makes total sense, but obviously it doesn't have to make sense. Money is king with these people.
The key to remember with these guys is that it has nothing to do with their equipment. There are plenty of people who love their Manhattan mod. I have used a legit a few times, and it was pretty good. I will not lie just to make a point, it is a solid mod. The price is a little high IMO, and I decided to go a different route than with one of theirs. Glad I did now for sure. They brought this onto themselves, mostly with the Todd thing. Todd is highly respected in the community, and they screwed up big time doing that. Now they have admitted it was done in a hung over state, which is not something they should have ever admitted. But since then the frequency of their missteps has been increasing. Have you ever seen a company send out what amounts to a press release, their "the story", on Instagram? Their story which equates clone users to Hitlers followers. And that is coming from the one guy who seemingly has some sense to him, Kyle. The other, Erik, is the one who told Todd they were going to sue him. He is also the one who posts a lot of the nonsense on their Facebook. Ameravape has a lot of issues going on right now, and allegedly owe a lot of people a lot of money.
So, does any of this make sense other than a company who has dug a hole so deep that they keep digging to try and get out, but only get deeper? I do not think they are smart enough to have gone to China and struck a deal to flood the market with their clones. Though, there is a picture on their own Instagram that is Erik talking to a guy in China and essentially threatening him. The weird part is that the Chinese guy keeps telling him "I am the friend of Colton. So we are friends too." He does ask what that means, and says it violates copyrights. This, to me, says they at least know who Colton is, and why he would have contacted China. It does not show them as complicit in these clones coming out. I will try and link it below. IG does weird things with links.
EDIT: Link Did Not Work. Go to Ameravapes IG it is there.
I have been a part of the clone buyer group conversation that got Twisted420 so upset with them, and was the one who made it known that they were using clones in their own videos. (I still don't get how you do not remove those before you go on a clone bash campaign.) Erik was involved early on, and was talking with the group. It was usually nonsense about how he loves us, and this and that. But at points he got rather testy and called at least one of the admins a racist, and a bunch of other stuff. Then tried to smooth it over by offering authentic devices to the admins, etc. They refused, and he has been quiet since. Kyle also sent the exact same rant including the Hitler part to Twisted420 before putting it on their IG. The bad part was we pointed out the bad grammar, the lack of wisdom on the Hitler part, and other things. They still put it out there.
SO, yeah there is a lot to this story. I do not seeing it ending well for Ameravape. It has gone too far at this point for them to turn it around. In a way, I hope I am wrong because we need strong advocates for vaping, not those who are tearing it apart from the inside out.