Imagine living in a country that is SO economically prosperous that the citizens throw perfectly good gameboys in the trash. These guys must be living the good life

I don't know chief. After I cleaned my laptop in the sink, it actually unlocked additional RAM. These guys seem legit to me.

The "I stumbled upon this thing completely randomly!" theme they do strongly reminds me of the setup for those horrible, fake, "animal rescue" videos that plague YouTube, where people will shove a puppy's head through some bike spokes and then "just stumble upon it" and "rescue" it.  Then the next week the same two people are "rescuing" the exact same dog from a hole in the ground three feet away from where the bike was.
The way they attempt faking a genuine find just isn't natural at all.  I can't quite put my finger on what, but something about it is just so unnatural.

I like how he throws away the screen lens and buys a new one yet awfully cleans up the screen and puts the degraded foam back on instead of buying a new (backlight) one

dang that's my gba that I lost during my asia vacation last year. glad they found it.

It's a lot more sinister and tragic when these same criminal organizations stage animal 'rescues'.

Incredible how some spray paint on the „rusty“ plastic not only makes it translucent but also magically makes a battery cover appear out of nowhere. This surely is alchemy!

When I pointed out my skepticism of this guys site involving suspect rust (mud/sand mixture) and a magic brush he used to eliminate the rust the response from other "viewers" was shocking. One idiot even called me a troll, while another said I should not say such things but praise the so called restorer for the time and effort he put into the video.  I totally agree with your comments and those of others here. Why not create a new channel devoted to exposing these fake restorers, even name and shame them. Sign me up as your first subscriber.

The cool part of this restoration magic is the transformation of opaque dark blue plastic shells into semi transparent red ones after two coats of red paint.

Yeah, it never made any sense how a rusty ass Gameboy covered in mud and degradation would magically work after soap and water and a new case xD

Submerging a screen like that would cause irreparable damage.

Also, small thing, but it was found without a battery cover and we didn’t see him paint the presumably aftermarket one he installed at the end.

With iron powder and a simple mixture, you can create rust on anything, so the rust may be real, just not naturally occurring because plastic obviously doesn’t rust.

The objects that these channels "stumble across" are obviously planted. And the rust they show is fake as well. It's always bright orange and evenly covering all sides of the object, like it was painted on -- probably made with a solution of salt water and iron filings, which quickly rusts when exposed to air. And they always completely reassemble the item before showing it working, to hide how they've swapped the internal components from a working unit.

The lazy ones just switch to a completely different unit to show the finished "restoration", and have been caught showing different serial numbers on the item they "found" versus the one they "restored". Or they film it in reverse order -- demonstrate the working unit first, then trash it with dirt and rust and plant it on the side of the road.

If you pause at 6:45 you can see the sun go through the plastic shells and CLEARLY these are fully red plastic ones as the sun light wouldn't shine through the red-painted-purple shell like it does on that frame.

You can tell some of these are fake from the thumbnail by the visible smear marks and lines from scrubbing dirt over the top of them. It's so ridiculous.

I saw a video on one of those channels and fixing a computer. It looked like they opened the tower, took out the motherboard, and then dumped mud on it. To add to that, when he lifts up the board and shows the underside it was PRISTINE. Looked brand new. So I point that out in the comments. The video was removed and re-uploaded an hour later with the only change being that they removed the part where they showed the underside of the muddy board. Unbelievable.

I’ve been watching Odd Tinkering for my restoration fix, and he usually states where he got the thing (junk/garage sale, fan sent it in, etc) what the problem seems to be (laser not reading, burnt screen, what have you) and goes step by step in how he fixes it—correct tools, isopropyl alcohol for the motherboards, soap and water for the cases, what parts had to be replaced. Even explained how he removes yellowing, which I had never even heard of before.

It inspired me to fix my ps4 controller that was having stick drift. There’s something so inspiring and fulfilling about watching someone who knows what they’re doing take something broken and making it work again. “Found in the wild” videos are just weird. Unless you’re a vlogger wearing a GoPro 24/7, there’s no reason to film the marshes unless it’s a fake setup for a fake fix

Hopefully I can hire this guy to restore my will to live.

Partially related but the "cinematography" , or how the scene is shot, is somehow related to those awful fake animal rescue videos where they would just walk around for a bit at the start, and they soon "stumbled upon" an animal in danger (that the people filming put that exact animal in danger), so they come and save the animal and start taking care of them

This whole new trend of faking to repair things that were damaged is set up coincidentally to the same as the fake animal rescues, but what do you think?

9:50 crazy how a bit of oil and fire completely changed the thread and length of those screws!