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Is there any entity or procedure that actually proves what a phone is what it claims to be? Unfortunately, neither IMEI, Serial Number or a combination of both
by chirau 2y ago
Is there any entity or procedure that actually proves what a phone is what it claims to be?
Unfortunately, neither IMEI, Serial Number or a combination of both can assert this.
I bought a Samsung S24 a week ago off Facebook Marketplace. It was in the box and everything. I cross checked both the IMEIs and also the Serial Number with the #06# test. I even checked them online. Did all the tests, #0# and even downloaded Samsung members. Paid for the phone, convinced it was a genuine one.
Upon registering it and using it, it becomes very clear the phone is fake and is at best a clone. The camera is nowhere near the S24 and does not have the features. It heats up after charging and does not keep charge. It runs slower than a 10 year Android once you are signed it.
when you run diagnostics, it shows all the specs of an S24 Ultra. How do I know this? I went and got another S24 Ultra from the store and they are worlds apart.
So my question is, if you are buying a phone from a reseller or someone, is there any way of definitely asserting whether it is authentic?
- yardstick 2y agoThis is typically where consumer rights laws come into play and a key advantage of buying first hand from a “real” business rather than an individual or third party. At least there you have someone you can easily hold to account. You need to price in the risk factor when purchasing where such legislation doesn’t apply or isn’t easy to enforce.
- tschwimmer 2y agoI’m sorry that this happened to you. The debugging and tear down sound like they would make for an extremely interesting blog post though. I encourage you to write it up and post it here - I’d definitely read it.
- miki123211 2y agoSome YouTuber bought one of these (not specifically an S24) and found a hidden app that "told" the phone what it should be. You could set how much RAM you wanted, how much storage, what CPU and so on, and then that info would be shown in all the "about" screens. They went to a few Tb of ram if I remember correctly. Changing any of these parameters didn't have an impact on what the phone could actually do, just to be clear.
- chirau 2y agoWould you have a link to the video by any chance? I would like to invest some time in showing how to detect and remove said app
- sfx2000 2y agoThe carrier can ID the device type by the radio layer itself at the PHY layer.
- chirau 2y agoHow would I go about doing this?
- numpad0 2y agoAnything on the display or reported by Linux Kernel can be faked, so no.