The first product is DDR4 RAM memories in SO-DIMM format that mimic the Kingston FURY Impact. It is striking how well done the counterfeiting of this product is. Although there are two main aspects that give it away: the sticker is smaller and the brand name does not appear (Kingston) nowhere. More subtle is the design of the PCB, if you look at the right side, you will see that in the fake one there are some resistors that do not appear in the model on the right.
Note that the one we have classified as false is the first design of the brand. There are still images on the net with a similarly narrow sticker, but the Kinston brand appears.
You may have doubts, but whoever has uploaded this product is a bungler. They have taken the official images of Kingston and have had the audacity to erase the Kingston mark with Paint. It can be clearly seen in these comparative images. Note that the upper image on the left is exactly the same as the image on the right that I have cut from the official Kingston website.
I am going to leave you the AliExpress page and also the official Kingston page so that you can review the information and buy it yourself. Be careful, we are not saying that it is a bad product, it may work well, but it is clearly an attempt to deceive the user.
SSD Samsung, surrealism in its purest form
Actually, there are very few fake Kingston memories compared to Samsung’s M.2 SSD counterfeiting attempts. There is literally dozens of M.2 SSD drives equal to the sale they try to imitate samsung products. I have chosen four different ones, but I will leave one aside because it is the most surreal of all.
The first three chosen are more or less similar. They are all M.2 drives that copy Samsung products in a devious way. if we go to Samsung official websitewe have the units SSD 980, SSD 970 EVO Plus and SSD 980 PRO, only these three models. But here we have a model (okay, three) called “980 EVO” that does not correspond to anything. What’s more, it appears as if are SATA drivesbut the units of Samsung are all PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0.
Of course, here they have sought to create a denomination similar to the official one, but different. This allows a clueless user who doesn’t know much to purchase the fake unit.
The forgery process is so extremely seedy, that they have taken images from the official Samsung website and have uploaded them without further ado. We can see below these lines two images of these products. The one on the left belongs to the “980 PRO” and you can see the image of the SSD where in the controller, DRAM memory and NAND memories with the name of Samsung. While the image on the right is also you can see that the image also belongs to the unit “980 PRO” but they have erased the samsung of the unit. There are other images cut and pasted from the official Samsung website where the “980 PRO” also appears, indicating that the images are stolen.
The scarecrow at the highest level
One can see that the level of “perfection” in counterfeitingto call it somehow has been falling But the following case, for us, is the ultimate insanity. Apparently we enter an official product, we see images of real Samsung SSDs, the typical marketing ones. But, there is something that catches our attention.
Typically, you segment by manufacturer when uploading a product. If I am going to sell SSDs from Samsung, Corsair, Kingston and Western Digital (hereinafter WD), I will create four different sales pages for each brand. But here we find mixed Samsung and WD products, it’s strange, but good.
Hovering the mouse over the thumbnails on the top left, everything seems to be going well. Until the mouse passes over the images of the WD SSDs and we see something strange. are units WD Black SN850which are of quite good quality, but something is wrong: they have erased part of the name with Photoshop (and wrong, by the way)
You can see in the image above the amount of differences that exist between both units. He Erase work is evidentThey have taken images from marketing or from a store and have faked them. They have erased the brand and the “B” of the “Black” already run.
Of course, this seedy action makes us think that this seller’s Samsung units are not real either. If you want to take a look, this is the page in question.
It also happens with ADATA XPG
Seen the last case that affects WD, we have thought of looking for other manufacturers. We have Found with ADATA XPG case, a brand that is not so well known in Spain, but that does have a lot of name abroad, especially in the United States and Asia. There is a lot to comment on here.
The first thing that has caught our attention is the name of the unit. One page sells it as XPG GAMMIX S11 and the other page as XPG GAMMIX S11 Lite. Our job is to go to the official website of XPG (by the way, name of ADATA’s gaming division) and search. Inside of official website we only found the GAMMIX S11 Proso we can say that the name does not fit, but pIt could be a misspelling.
But, there is a very important detail, the GAMMIX S11 Pro has a passive heatsink. All the images that we have seen on Google of the unit have a passive heatsink. This is important, since the images of the two pages of AliExpress are shown without a heatsink.
We have compared and the one that is sold as XPG GAMMIX S11 Lite on AliExpress really is the SX6000 Pro unit. At least the unit, product and performance images belong to this product.
The biggest problem is in the XPG GAMMIX unit from AliExpress. After reviewing the XPG drives, none match in design. We look at the controllerbeing all of square layout XPGwhile this one has a rectangular design. So we can say that it is a false unit, at least, compared to the official information.
Conclusion
These are just a few cases, surely there are more. The most worrisome are those from Samsung and Kingston, which are clearly counterfeit products. But, this is very old, there will always be someone who tries to take advantage of the gaps in the platforms.
A few years ago, Amazon began to strictly pursue false product reviews to improve their positioning. This led to the expulsion of many users and brands. A process that had not been done before for economic reasons, since it was interesting to grow at all costs.
Possibly AliExpress is at the same point, that they keep these fake products for the moment. It is foreseeable that at some point they will clean the store, leaving only legal products or products that are not misleading. When will this happen? Well, it’s impossible to know.
Meanwhile, all that remains is to look closely at the product we want to buy and ask Saint Google. We must verify, first of all, if the characteristics of the product match the original. Also check the price on other websites, since if there are large price variations, presumably the product is not real.
