In the past week, a few forum and Reddit threads have popped up, with people stating that JLCPCB has emailed them with a notice, saying their accounts are set up for terminations after an assessment by JLCPCB’s “Risk Control Team”. Reasons given are vague, the terminations are non-appealable, and if you’re planning a JLCPCB order sometime soon, it can certainly come as a surprise. From the looks of it, the accounts restricted do not appear to be tied to any specific country – and not even from the same “kind” of countries.

As quite a few people have observed, the JLCPCB reasoning resembles a compliance action way more than it resembles any sort of internal policy. A few days ago, JLCPCB has released a statement on their blog, claiming that a “history of risky IP addresses and risky activities” would be grounds for a termination, and mentioning “compliance” in ways that would hint at external legal pressures.

By now, quickly checking around Reddit and some other places, we’ve counted at least ten people affected so far – most of them have received emails about account closures, but at least one person has reported a denial when attempting to place an order, instead of getting an email ahead of time. The latter hints that there’s a number of people not yet notified about their account getting terminated, and the amount of people actually affected might very well be a fair bit larger than we can see.

A few people say that they had success placing orders with other Chinese fabs after a JLCPCB account termination, which would somewhat complicate the “compliance” angle, but it’s entirely possible it’s just a matter of time before the less prominent Chinese PCB fabs catch up to whatever measure prompted the JLCPCB action.

Wading through the EEVbog forum thread, which is the most active place this issue has been discussed so far, people have a number of guesses, but none of them appear plausible. Some say that China’s recent rare earth material export restriction could conceivably be related to this issue, but it doesn’t quite make sense why that kind of restriction would cause account closures as opposed to the usual order denials, or why JLCPCB would mention “risky IP addresses”, given that the rare earth restriction applies worldwide.

Unless you’ve received an email, it appears there might be no surefire way to check for such a restriction until you attempt to place an order. JLCPCB says they will pay out the account balance, but aside from that, people report problems related to customer components purchased for PCBA reasons, with JLCPCB refusing to ship those components to a non-Chinese address in at least one case of a locked account, and asking for a 30% service fee while at it.

Until we get more clarity, this is yet another reason to try out a non-monopolistic PCB fab for one of your next orders – such as Aisler and OSHPark for EU and US areas respectively. Export restrictions are getting their tentacles into more and more facets of open-source tech development, so it pays to watch out. Of course, if you order from China a lot, you might already have rehearsed for such disruptions, due to the yearly event known as Chinese New Year.