Be careful at online flea markets. Iltalehti reader Maija told her story when she bought a new phone.
There is a difference between the screens of a fake and a real phone. Otherwise, the device looks the same externally. Antti Mannermaa, Iltalehti
Maija bought Samsung’s new Galaxy S23 Ultra flagship phone at an online flea market for over a thousand euros. In the end, the seemingly genuine purchase was not what the seller had promised Maija.
Maija’s name has been changed, and she does not want to appear in the story under her own name.
The seller sold the phone in an unopened package with an unbreakable seal. The seller also found a receipt for the product.
The phone seemed good and Maija decided to make a deal with the seller. The transactions were made face to face.
The fake is revealed
After getting home and testing the phone, Maija began to wonder why the phone was working poorly.
– I wondered how the new phone works this way, Maija tells Iltalehte.
Maija contacted the store with the receipt, which stated that the seller has not had similar receipts for a long time. No sales were found in the store with the corresponding receipt information. This raised doubts about the authenticity of the phone.
– Yes, even the store manager wondered about the situation.
Maija, who works in the field of information technology, set out to find out the authenticity of the phone. The unique IMEI code used to identify the phone was correct. The situation was strange.
While updating the operating system, it was revealed that the new phone had an operating system that was more than three years old. When logging into Google’s app store, the store recognized the phone as completely different from what Maija thought her new phone was. According to the app store, the phone Maija bought was actually Samsung’s GalaxyNote10. Of course, it was a top phone when it came out in 2019, but in four years it has already fallen far from the top – after all, the model had already been discontinued in 2021.
The IMEI code of the phone Maija bought was probably cloned. Maija could no longer contact the online seller, and at this point stated that she had become the victim of a cunning scam.
Fakes are rare
In new phones, making this kind of fake is not an easy task. Lifewire website according to that, cloning a phone’s IMEI code is also illegal in a large part of the world.
– Counterfeit Samsung phones are very rare in Finland, Samsung Finland country manager Mika Engblom tells.
Techlicious website says that cloning can be done, for example, for the purpose of espionage. Thus, it is possible that the data stored on Maija’s phone could have ended up in the wrong hands, if the phone had been used.
There have been a lot of fake phones in circulation in recent years. For example, you can buy fake iPhones in China for only a fraction of the price of the real one.