I purchased RepRapGuru's Pruas i3 V2 kit and assembled it, only to find it had a dead 5v regulator on the Arduino board(fairly common).
When contacting their customer support (it took MANY emails and phone calls before I even got one response), I was called back by what I now know is an ex-employee of theirs who is scamming people by "selling" bogus non-existent "upgrade" parts. I've now lost $148 due to this scam. After many unanswered emails, Reprapguru finally got back to me and admitted that this employee was fired in March of 2019 for doing his own customer support after hours. Apparently Reprapguru didn't even change their voicemail password because this employee "Dax" is STILL using their customer support voicemail to scam people into paying him via a PayPal. He's literally hijacking Reprapguru's customer support line to harvest suckers for his scam, all in Reprapguru's name. After payment, you find that his PayPal account leads to somewhere in the Philippines. When contacting Reprapguru again to sort this out, they have apparently ghosted me. 4 emails over 3 days now and I have yet to hear from them. So I'm beginning to think it's not an "ex-employee" at all, and that the whole company is scamming people.


I'm NOT the first person this has happened to! See for yourself. Go to reprap dot org forums > Prusa i3 and variants > RepRap Guru i3 Printer Kit (Official Thread) and look at page 6 at the very end a post by "boberts314". This scammer calls himself "Trey McCormick". Reprapguru refuses to do anything about it. No wonder they're bribing people with filament for 5 star reviews - they're putting a tourniquet to try to prop-up their otherwise lousy ratings!


So, to sum up, I'm out $148, with a $280 printer that's defective, and a company that refuses to do anything about my situation, and the ex-employee who's scamming people in Reprapguru's name. A very painful $428 lesson.


STAY AWAY! There are too many other reputable vendors to choose from.


I've returned this printer, and am posting this message on every community forum and online vendor I can find, in the hope of helping some other poor tinkerer from the same fate. Good luck makers!