Sunday, July 18, 2010

Spot fake 2nd-gen iPod nano adverts

Some dodgy person based in Suffolk keeps trying to shift ipods at an impossibly cheap price. I reported all the items to e-bay and his/her zero rated account was pulled. They're back two weeks later claiming to be from Felixstowe instead of Ipswich. Yep, same typos, same thin story about trying to shift them 'for a mate'. Same 0-rated account with different name.Whoever it is claims to have the iPods in a capacity of 8Gb and with a silver colour. Stop right there. Apple isn't even producing the 8Gb (high-end) nano in different colours. 2Gb in silver, 4Gb in silver, pink, blue, green, or (special charity edition) red. 8Gb in 'any colour you like, as long as it's black'. Apple seem to have a conscious black=high-end thing going at the moment (cf the infamous 'black tax' on their laptops).Apple are notoriously practicing economies of scale with their flash mp3 players so that they can compete in a cutthroat market. It's like mobile phones and printers: you save money on the equipment so that they can charge you lots of money on the contents and consumables (songs, calls, ink cartridges, photo paper etc). For this reason, the standard price difference between high street shops and online dealers for, say, an iPod nano is generally less than 10 rather than the 50/100 or more you might see on a other high-tech items.The most likely possibility is that these items are:

1. stolen

2. faked to report a higher capacity than exists, with compression, the way dodgy flash memory sellers do. Since MP3 or AAC audio files are already compressed, they cannot compress further to save space

3. non-existent; the owner of the account will grab as many sales as possible, never send out product, then trash the junk account and start another one, or4. fake. It's an MP3 player, it may or may not play Apple's AAC format, it's a dodgy Taiwanese rip-off with extra features (voice recording, different languages including Chinese, radio...) but without Apple's famous user interface, and more likely to break than not. Apparently fakes look remarkably like iPods to the naked eye nowadays, except that the shoddy workmanship is visible if put next to a real one. Selling these isn't necessarily breaking the law (particularly if weasel words like 'alike' are used), but the intention is clearly fraudulent, to scam the user into buying a product because they think it's a more desirable one than it actually is.(Note: I forgot to put this possibility in my original guide, which was foolish, as it is probably the most likely.)
I have no knowledge of this person, other than recognisably similar fraudulent ads flooding my searches every time I look for ipod-related kit in East Anglia.Come on, ebay UK, clean up your act!

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