What happened with The Block

If you searched "Yarro Studios scam" and landed here from Reddit or a 1-star review, you've heard one side. Here's mine, with the receipts.

Hiring The Block Logistics was our call. So was staying too long.

How we got here

In 2024 we hired The Block (shipblock.com, Salt Lake City) to warehouse and ship Gamefold, Diceomatic, and our Kickstarter accessory orders. They were introduced through a consultant who worked closely with their team. Block pitched themselves as a serious operator. They told us, in writing, they had worked with ZAGG, Braven, Hugo Boss, and other major brands. We took that as proof they could handle our volume. We built a shipping budget of roughly $1.2M off the numbers they helped supply. They promised us a 3PL portal to track our own inventory in real time. We never got access to it.

Block told us in writing that their LAX warehouse could ship 2,000 orders a week and their NJ warehouse could ship 500. That's 2,500 a week between two locations. We took them at their word.

What actually happened

Six months in, we had paid Block roughly $1.5 million and fulfillment wasn't close to done. We ran our own projection on what it would cost to finish — about another $300,000. That would put us $600K over the original budget, but we were learning the real cost of this in real time, so we accepted it and pushed Block to finish.

When we told Block our number and asked them to wrap it up, they came back with a different one. They said the finishing cost would be $500,000. A few weeks later, after we told them we were going to come pick up our own product and finish fulfillment ourselves, the number went to $700,000. Then to $1 million. The faster we pushed for the end, the bigger the bill got.

That's when Block started using our inventory as leverage.

In the same period, the actual shipping work was a fraction of what Block had promised. Between mid-November 2025 and mid-January 2026, Block moved roughly 800 orders. Eight weeks. That's about 100 orders per week — against 2,500 per week Block had promised in writing.

We sent someone from our team to their LA warehouse in December to find out why things were so slow. They knew he was coming. The team wasn't working when he arrived. They were having a holiday party.

The invoices we couldn't reconcile

The bills weren't just high. They didn't add up.

• An invoice came through for $73,536 that was for a completely different company. Block had attached another client's invoice to a Yarro reference number. We caught it. They didn't.
• A $29,365 invoice listed 10 orders. $29K for 10 orders is nonsense. When we refused to pay it, Block came back days later and said it was actually 710 orders. They never provided tracking numbers, packing slips, or any documentation we could reconcile against.
• In late August 2025, Block sent us a new "Negotiated Rate Arrangement" with handling fees of $1.80 for small items and $6.00 for large items — rates we had never seen before. The documents didn't specify whether the storage rate was daily, weekly, or monthly. The units weren't labeled. They tried to apply the new rates retroactively. We never approved them.
• Block was billing for hundreds of premium European shipments — DPD Next Day, DPD 12:00, DPD Two Day expedited services — that we never authorized. They denied doing it. Their own shipment data showed at least 433 shipments sent that way.

When we asked Block why the balance kept ballooning, the answer was some version of "we don't have exact numbers from the vendors yet." That answer told us something we hadn't fully understood when we hired them. A meaningful portion of the warehousing and fulfillment work was being done by other companies that Block subcontracted to. Their Hong Kong location was, in Block's own written words, "a separate warehouse." When we asked about invoice line items, Block often couldn't explain them because the underlying numbers were coming from vendors Block themselves were waiting on.

We thought we'd hired a fulfillment company. The structure turned out to be more complicated than that.

The audit they didn't want

In early February 2026 we stopped paying Block and formally disputed all outstanding invoices. We asked them to sit down and reconcile everything — line by line, what was charged, what was paid, what was justified.

Block agreed to reconcile. On one condition: we had to promise not to look at the $1.5 million in invoices we'd already paid. We have that in writing.

Not "they billed too much." Not "they were slow." A company we'd already paid $1.5M would only agree to reconcile our open balance if we agreed in writing not to look at the $1.5M we'd already given them. Whatever was in those invoices, they didn't want us going back through it.

The leverage and the threats

On January 27, 2026 — hours after we asked Block to release two trucks of inventory we'd already paid for — Block wrote this:

Block set the credit limit at $100K. Block allowed our balance to grow past $500K without pausing service or warning us. Block did not substantiate the invoices that built the balance. And then Block decided our customers' Gamefold tables and Diceomatic orders were the chip.

The leverage was your orders.

We also asked Block, repeatedly, for the contact information of the overseas warehouses holding our international inventory. We had product sitting in Hong Kong, Canada, the UK, and the EU and we wanted to talk to the warehouses directly so we could push fulfillment forward. Block refused. In writing. We were not allowed to know where our own customers' goods were physically located.

On March 6, 2026, Block put it in writing: they were going to "reach out to your customers to inquire on payment, and likely need to liquidate the inventory." That's our fulfillment company telling us they planned to contact our backers directly for payment they had already made to us. We replied the next day that doing so would be tortious interference with contract.

They escalated anyway. On March 27, 2026, Block's "final" settlement offer arrived in writing. The alternative remedies they listed if we didn't pay included liquidating our inventory and destroying our inventory. In the same email they reminded us they had consignee information for our customers and could "issue mass notices."

That was the moment we understood what we were dealing with. Our attorneys advised us to stop talking publicly while Block had physical control of our inventory. So we went quiet. Backers asked us where their stuff was, and we couldn't answer in a way that made sense without putting more inventory at risk. That silence is the thing most of you remember. It wasn't because we didn't care. It was because there were trucks of product we still needed to get back.

Why we settled at all

We believe we could have fought this and gotten our goods without paying Block another dime. We had the documentation, we had no signed contract holding us to their numbers, and we had a strong case. But fighting it meant litigation. Litigation meant no movement on inventory for at least a year. That's a year of you waiting and a year of us not running a business.

We chose to settle for the amount we believed was actually outstanding. We didn't budge from that number. Block eventually accepted it.

We didn't settle because we agreed with Block. We settled because the fastest way to get product into your hands was to pay a number we could live with and walk away.

The settlement

We settled with Block in April 2026 for $300,000. Block had previously claimed we owed up to $1,087,000. We never agreed with that number and refused to pay it.

The settlement contains no NDA and no non-disparagement clause. That's how we're able to write this.

As part of the settlement, Block was required to introduce us directly to the overseas warehouses they'd refused to identify for months. We now know where every unit of product is.

Where we are now — updated June 10, 2026

All nine truckloads are home. Every pallet from Block's US warehouses is now at our new fulfillment partner in Utah, counted and sorted. US shipping is underway. Kickstarter backers ship first, then web pre-orders.

Hong Kong is recovered too. Everything that was sitting there has been picked up.

EU and Canada are the last two pieces. We know exactly where the goods are, and we've counted and mapped every outstanding order ourselves. 528 EU orders across 18 countries. Every Canadian order accounted for. All of it covered by inventory already sitting in those regions.

The EU is moving. We've signed with a new fulfillment partner in the Netherlands. Four full truckloads get collected this Friday, and we're shooting to have every EU order shipped by June 26. Canada is right behind it. We're in final talks with a Vancouver fulfillment partner, and those orders move as soon as the contract is signed.

Nobody's getting told we ran out.

What's changed at Yarro

We're not at Block anymore. We've moved to regional 3PLs across the US, EU, UK, Canada, and Australia. Every contract is reviewed and signed by me. We can see inventory in every location in real time. No middlemen.

If something goes sideways again, you'll hear it from us first.