I knew shenanigans was going to go down so I conveyed to DeepComputing that I wanted to wait until the product was available to place my order. 1 month after that I got an email from them stating "Our product, [...] has been available for some time now" so I believed them. Turns out they meant the pre-orders were open. So even though I knew this was coming, I still managed to fall into an international pre-order situation.

(FWIW I assume this was a language barrier issue leading to a misunderstanding, perhaps with a customer service rep that didn't review my past messages. I don't think DeepComputing intended to trick me.)