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.   

 

Counterfeit Kingston USB Flash Drives

Counterfeit flash drives are a huge problem on Aliexpress (and on ebay as well). This is actually the reason for why I discovered that there was a lot of counterfeit products on Aliexpress. Some time ago I ordered what I thought was a no-brand 8gb flash drive(product listing).  I picked that specific drive because I liked that the design was similar to the Kingston DTSE9  flash drive (I didn't realize that it was the same model number at the time). This is what I received.

I immediately thought this was suspicious. The seller had not advertised it as a Kingston drive at all and the images was taken at angels that avoided the Kingston logo.
After a quick search on Google, I discovered that these counterfeit flash drives are often hacked to show a higher capacity than they really have. It tricks the computer in to believing the drive is larger than it actually is, but if you fill it up with more data than the actual capacity, the data will be either lost or corrupted.
To test the flash drive I had received, I used a program called: h2testw. (download link)
Surprisingly the flash drive was actually 8gb as advertised and the write speed was as good as a genuine Kingston drive. The only physical difference I was able to spot was that parts inside the usb connector was yellow and not black and there was also a minor displacement of the text on the side (about 2mm), which was impossible to spot without comparing it to a genuine flash drive.

At the time I did not bother to open a dispute since it was not advertised as a Kingston flash drive, it worked as supposed to and I didn't have that much evidence. 

Some time later I bought another counterfeit Kingston flash drive(product listing). I chose 64gb gold edition this time, well aware that Kingston, according to their official datasheet, only produced 8gb and 16gb versions in gold (DTGE9). This time I received a flash drive with seemed to be a 32gb flash drive (not 64 as I ordered), but it was actually an 8gb flash drive, capacity hacked to show 32gb. 

I opened a dispute and you can read the dispute details and messages between me and the seller below. (messages is shown from bottom to top) 

(click on picture to enlarge)

As you see in the messages I got quite angry when the seller offered me less than half the price I paid and then asked me to give him five stars, which I think is ridiculous. He later tried to convince me that he is a victim of a bad supplier, but eventually gives me a refund. 

Notice how he tries to lay the responsibility on his supplier and the last message where he tries hard to give me a better impression and ask me not to rate him at all. It is important not to accept the request from the seller to give a good rating, after all he did try to scam me and giving a bad rating is the most efficient way of warning other buyers of these sellers.

As you might guess, I gave him 1 star.

Introduction

Welcome to my new blog!
First I want to write a bit about myself and the reason for starting this blog.
I am a 19 year old boy from Norway and I live in  small city near Oslo which is the capital city in Norway. I am generally very interested in all kinds of electronics and computers, but, unlike many others on my age, my main interest is the actual hardware and electronics and not software like games. I like games as well and I even have a relatively small collection of gaming consoles, but I really don`t play that much and I wouldn't consider myself as a gamer. I would also really like to learn a programming language but it is still the hardware electronics that is my main interest.
Some years ago I  discovered online shopping. My first experience was with dealextreme.com and I really liked the idea that you could by cheap products online and even get them shipped from china for free. When  I got old enough to start paying for online purchases without the help of my parents, I really started to buy a lot of things online and I found my favorite webshop: Aliexpress.com.
Aliexpress is a bit similar to ebay in a way, there are lots of different sellers and stores, but the main difference is that the products is new and almost always from china. It have the same type of products like dealextreme.com, but there is a much bigger selection of products and products are often cheaper.
But Aliexpress have some problems. Since there is a lot of sellers, Aliexpress can not control that the products they are selling is genuine and if they are of good quality, but they have made it safe to use by using an escrow system. When you pay for a product, your money will be paid to Aliexpress and when you have received your product and confirmed that it is in acceptable condition, then Aliexpress will pay the seller. This system gives you a buyer protection that is working well. But there is still a lot of counterfeits out there and it is often hard to spot a counterfeit from the genuine product. This is the reason for why I am starting this blog. I want to help others spot counterfeits and make the responsible sellers lose their money. I'm going to do that by actively look up counterfeits and buy them just to open a dispute and get my money back. By doing that, the seller would lose money, I can leave a bad feedback for the seller and I can inform you about the counterfeit product and give you detailed pictures of what the counterfeits look like to help you spot them.
This is the end of my first post and I really hope you enjoyed it. English is not my primary language so if you notice some typos or bad sentences, then feel free to comment about it, but always give me a suggestion for what I could have done different.

Thanks for reading! I hope you will read my next post which will be about counterfeit Kingston usb flashdrives.