Fake Samsung USB Charger

There are a lot of counterfeit and unbranded USB chargers on aliexpress and ebay. Some people think that a charger is a charger and that a $1 charger will work just as good as a genuine Samsung or Apple charger. That is unfortunately not true. To produce these super cheap chargers, they need to reduce the production cost and they do that by removing important components. The cheapest USB-chargers only have the basic components and they do not follow safety standards, in many of these chargers, there are less than 1 mm between the input and the output and it can easily be shorted and cause fire and damage the product you are charging. Most of these chargers are sold as "no brand" chargers but they often look very similar and some look almost identical to the chargers that come bundled with phones of known brands, especially Apple and Samsung. Some of the sellers advertise these chargers as genuine from the known brands.

Like this one, that I bought on Aliexpress.

I bought two of these to check if the serial numbers was unique. As you can see on the picture, they were identical and it confirmed that they were counterfeits. The price of these was almost $10 and that a lot more than most of the counterfeit chargers. The chargers was of better quality than the cheaper counterfeits available, and after inspecting the circuit board, my conclusion was that the chargers was probably safe to use.

Even tho the charges seems to be safe, is it still not as good as the original, after measuring the output, I found out that the voltage was noisy and unstable and I would not recommend to use this charger to charger you phone or tablet. The seller gave me a full refund after I opened a dispute. It is important to always give the seller a negative feedback as this is the best way to warn other buyers of these sellers.

Generally you should never use a charger bought cheap online from ebay or aliexpress without inspecting the circuit board first and in most cases the charger will be more or less useless after opening because it was was not designed to be opened.