Profile of a fraudulent presentation
Recently I bought with one of our private eBay buyer accounts a Nokia N95 8GB online, or at least I bought what I thought would be Nokia N95 8GB. I will show in a few articles how fraudulent offers or misrepresentations are made and how difficult it can be for the buyer to detect such fraudulent offers.
1. The offer
As you see, the Sales Page Title refers clearly to a Brand New Nokia N95 8Gb….
…and so does the item description here below: see Brand: Nokia and the model is N95, plus the features describe Nokia N95 features:
Here above the seller states clearly: "This phone has a great 5 MP camera and 8GB of memory .."
Then the description continues with a copy of Nokia’s N95 feature list, whereas the Blue texts hyperlink to an external site: gsmarena.com, where the real Nokia Specifications are listed and reviewed. I doubt that gsmarena would be happy about the abuse of their name…
and it goes on with specifications, all linking to gsmarena…
All specifications from the real Nokia N95 8GB.
Finally the pictures used are all from the original Nokia N95 8GB:
Note this is a box of an original Nokia N95 8GB; the box I received was not the same…
The above phone to TV cable was not included in what I received…
This original headset was not included…..
Another view of the real Thing…please note the Brand is written in clear silver-white letters, while what I received was sort of yellowish…
Here we recognize the original label inside the phone … mine did not correspond. The label contains also the Models ID. Nokia could not recognize the ID on my label (I have verified with Nokia).
As you can see, the seller nowhere makes any statement about this phone being a fake or illegal copy.
2. The Seller
The impression I had from the seller was ok: 100% positive feed-backs, a member of eBay since 2004 and so on:
There you go … the image of the perfect, nice guy and father.
3. Payment
The payment was made via PayPal.
4. What I received
The seller shipped the item rapidly and it arrived here a few days ago.
What I received was in a Box not belonging to a Nokia N95 8GB. When opening the box, the phone looked fine at the first glance, and the documentation as well. The accessories as described were not included.
I stuck my Sim card into the phone to test the features.
When accessing the menu I noticed that the menu did not correspond to the Nokia N95 8GB descriptions which was to be found in the package as well as online at nokia.com.
Some of the features I was particularly interested in was the 8 GB memory and the exceptional 5 MP built in Camera with Carl Zeiss Optics, Autofocus and the 30 fps video cam. The camera in the phone I received does not correspond at all to these features and the objective is by no means a Carl Zeiss objective. Being a Leica freak for over 25 years, I know what a good lense looks like and achieves.
The FM radio function detailed in the sellers offer…simply does not exist and the same applies for other features, namely internet related ones.
Conclusion:
The item has been misrepresented by the seller, trademarks and copyrights have been violated and the item as such is an illegal item, which according to eBay’s rules must not be offered on eBay.
Further more the seller is linking to a trustworthy site for reference, abusing thus the name of the targeted site.
In a next article I will talk about the means at my disposal to repair the damage caused, and to point out some legal implications.