One month ago I bought a new phone because the battery on my Samsung Galaxy S3 was losing capacity. That problem showed up several times before. Here is my story:
After the first year and a half using my Galaxy S3 I had an issue. The battery started to swell a little bit and couldn't keep it's power long enough to last a day. So I ordered a new official Samsung battery on ebay. Installed it and i was good to go. I thought my first battery was just from a bad batch, so I didn't give it a lot of attention.
One year later it started to swell again. I started looking online if other people had the same problem and they did. Apparently the battery tends to swell when the phone gets hot a lot. Indeed the phone got hot a lot using mobile internet. Even so hot that it scared me sometimes when it was in my pocket. I contacted Samsung to address this problem. They said they were aware of it and sent me a new battery for free. It was only a matter of time to see the other battery swelling as well. The newer Galaxy S4's had the same problem, so I decided to get another brand.
(I left the S3 and the battery untouched and it doubled in size as you can see. Thank God it never exploded during a call or anyting.)
Why I went for an iPhone I wanted one of these, because I figured these phones had a better build quality and lasted long (if you don't drop them). A friend of me had his iPhone 4 for 4 or 5 years and it still worked fine. Only the homebutton didn't work anymore (but there is a solution for that).
Buying it used from sellers online was a great idea I thought. (As a student I try to save as much as I can on things that lose value quickly.) I found a guy that was selling his brand new iPhone 6 32gb for €500. ⧫He was selling it because his girlfriend didn't like to use it. I contacted him and a bunch of other sellers, but he was the only one that replied.
He told me to call him. ⧫On the call he asked if I was an iPhone user already. (As you know I wasn't). The call ended and he sent me an address. I arrived at the spot and he asked to sit in the car. He seemed like a nice guy, explained everything about the phone, that it was his birthday today, then he showed the bill for the warranty. He compared the IMEI number on the bill and in the settings. When I swiped a bit and opened a few apps it looked good, so I gave him the money.
When I came home I started to explore. Adjusted some settings, took a picture,... Then I tried to log in on the App store, suddenly the Google Play Store opened up. The minute I realised it was a fake iPhone my heart started pumping so hard. My emotions went on a rollercoaster. I was angry and sad on the same time. The money I just lost was almost half of my savings. I checked to see if the bill was fake as well... and it was. One second I thought/hoped that the phone only had some custom firmware installed or something.
The next workday I went to file this scam to the police. They wrote everything down what I said. The address, how he looked, his phone number,etc.. They linked up the phone and looked for deleted messages. They found nothing. Case closed...
People will call me stupid
After thinking how everything happened I saw the red flags (that I marked with "⧫" before every sentence in my story). People will probably see some extra flags. I didn't spot the red flags because I was super excited to get my first iPhone, plus the fake iPhone looked so real. The software was 95% the same. When booting up it showed an Apple logo, home screen looked exactly the same, firing up the camera showed a square box like the real iPhone, etc... On the outside I can't spot any differences compared to a real iPhone.
It learned me a lesson
*Trust your gut instinct, especially buying used and popular tech.
*Don't get emotionally involved when buying (houses, tech, cars,...) if you want a good deal.
*When it's too good to be true, it probably is.