I am in America and have yet to get screwed by a counterfeit. I wonder if you might be on to something though. Maybe the counterfeits are all stored in specific states and ship from there more frequently since I assume Amazon wants to ship from the closest warehouse to you. Would be good to know what state most of these people live in to see if thats just the pattern. I say this cause I have always heard you can buy counterfeits in NY of any major clothing brand or even electronics.
I have stopped buying from Amazon because I have received a few product which had something off but I could not tell what.
For example, we used to buy GE fridge filters from Amazon. Every once in a while we would receive a filter which would change taste of water in weird way. New filters usually make water taste slightly different but it was just a bit more off. But we used to ignore that until we start reading about fake products.
So next time when we experienced weird water taste with filter change, I carefully checked our old filter with the new one and sure enough there were subtle differences. Really impossible to notice accidentally.
Since then we started buying filters from Home Depot, and we have had pretty consistent experience so far.
>> I am in America and have yet to get screwed by a counterfeit.
> Well, how do you know?
> Maybe they’ve been good counterfeits?
Well, sure. I've bought SD cards (frequently mentioned as a problem category) off of Amazon without ever experiencing a problem. Maybe I've received counterfeits, but I still think it's fair to say I've never gotten screwed by a counterfeit.
I mean the downside to a counterfeit card is probably that it is going to fail very quickly. I'd think even grandma would notice if she can't access her photos after a few months?
I've been screwed by a counterfeit SD card and it seems like the "manufacturer" probably took older, smaller capacity cards where the back stock had outlived demand for those specs and just reprogrammed them to identify as a higher capacity, premium SD from Samsung, reprinted the label (very well), got their packaging basically identical to Samsung's, sent them to Amazon where Amazon seemingly decided they should be co-mingled with the Samsung-supplied cards and sold off as such.
For the consumer, I only realized something was wrong when I filled the actual size of the SD card and started getting errors, but still those errors came from my phone and basically said the SD want being detected and to reformat. So it could have been a phone issue. Only after going down the internet's Amazon counterfeit rabbit hole and then finding a program that checks counterfeit cards did I find out the card was actually a 32GB card with probably some awful I/O rates and not the 128GB that it was a announcing to devices. And for all that time, energy, frustration, money, and data lost to phone reformats, Amazon didn't give two craps. They said I was outside the return window and if my item was defective I should contact the manufacturer. They probably only didn't say "seller" because they were the seller, no 3rd party. It clearly want on the CS script to consider that you can't call the legitimate manufacturer about a defective counterfeit product sold as legitimate by the same business they count on to sell their legitimate products.
It could also be slower read and write speeds. Also, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but the difference in expected life of the product could be in years, such as 1 year for a counterfeit versus 10 years for a brand name.
I buy almost entirely counterfeit/knockoff goods. Quality is variable, but paying only 20% of the retail price for a similarish item works out well for me.
I don't really understand why anyone would buy originals to be honest...
I am an engineer, so claims like 'it's made in china and might explode' I can take with an appropriate sized grain of salt. One thing to watch out for is that chinese made devices are not expected to be safe if you don't follow the instructions. For example, if a device says 'do not charge for more than 2 hours', that means if you leave it on charge overnight it will catch fire. In the USA, devices need to be safe even if the instructions aren't followed.
This has got to be a troll post. How could anyone think it's acceptable for something to catch fire if they accidentally leave it plugged in too long? Do you set a timer each time you plug something in? Do counterfeiter items always come with their modified counterfeit-only instructions with these new rules to follow? Do they say "Note: this is a counterfeit so we replaced the food bowl's paint with a cheaper lead-based one, thus do not eat from it, especially not your children"?
Only 40 years ago, this was the case in the USA.. with rechargeable AA batteries. Chargers at the time didn't have detection for the battery being full, and after a few hours on an inappropriately sized fast charger, a battery would emit steam.
China is just a little behind, and the public has quickly come to assume devices are safe even if abused.
Isn't there a little engineering principle called "Murphy's Law"? If I recall correctly, the gist of it is "If something can be done incorrectly, it eventually will be done incorrectly."
Designing with Murphy's Law in mind is essential for not killing your customers and burning down their cities, or downing their passenger airliners, or crashing their cars.
It doesn't even cost more, in a company that can be sued for the liabilities of their defective products.
I don’t know what industry you work on where it’s ever ok for things to catch on fire if the user doesn’t follow instructions, but at least in mine even the word fire is out of bounds.
I've always thought there should be a .adv TLD, and if you're caught serving anything but first party information outside of that, there would be severe penalties.
Let one TLD take all the cutthroat inhumane tracking, malware, scum adserving, all of it, and let the rest of us browse in peace.
Either a trip or someone who buys counterfeit products on the street, where information in the market is known. If you buy a Gucci bag on the street, you know it's not really Gucci and you price accordingly. The same for DVDs, or electronics in a shady camera store. This is different. This is deception by a company that wants you to believe you're buying the real thing and charging you in accordance.
