Buyers, beware! A Reddit user said he just spent $500 on a device he thought was a perfectly legitimate Samsung Galaxy S6, only to realize he had been scammed after the seller had gotten away with his money.
College student MalcolmSex said he purchased his Galaxy S6 clone from a man claiming to be Canadian who posted on Craigslist Salt Lake City an ad for the new Samsung flagship smartphone for $500. The man claimed to have purchased the SM-G920i model that was incompatible with CDMA networks, so he wanted to sell the device at a lower price than the $700 Samsung charges for the unlocked model.
"I met him in a public space 20 minutes from my house, and popped in my AT&T SIM in so I could verify that it was in fact unlocked," recounted MalcolmSex. "I asked him for his number so I could call him, but he didn't have it memorized as it was temporary (huge red flag). The phone worked, and the hardware looked legit, so I paid him just under $500 and proceeded to drive away without recording his license number."
After a little bit more tweaking with his new phone, the user realized he had been duped. At first glance, the phone's packaging and hardware looked like those of a real Galaxy S6, although the box was missing the outer sleeve. The device also had the same glass front and back and an oleophobic coating that, after some inspection, looked terrible, the buyer said.
Looking closer, he realized the phone's microphone was on the wrong side, the USB port was upside down, and the home button was a little squishy.
"Coming from a Nexus 5, I was not familiar enough with Samsung to notice small details like that," the user said in a Reddit AMA.
After running some benchmark tests, it is clear the student was robbed of $500. While the real Galaxy S6 toppled its flagship competition in every benchmark test it was put through, the fake phone only bested entry-level phones of previous years with its mid-range MediaTek MT 6852 chip. Unlike the real Galaxy S6 boasting a premium AMOLED display with 2560 x 1440 resolution, this one did not even make it to high-definition with its 1280 x 720 display.
One of the biggest indicators that the phone was a clone was perhaps the fact that it claimed to be running Android 5.0.2 Lollipop, but the logo showed that it was on Android KitKat.
In his own words, the buyer calls himself a "massive f---ing idiot," but is nonetheless trying to earn back his lost $500 with a personal funding page.
