Over the years we have seen a lot of fake electronics, ranging from fake power saving devices that you plug into an outlet, to fake car ECU optimizers that you stick into the OBD port. These are all similar in that they fake functionality while happily lighting up a LED or two to indicate that they’re doing ‘something’. Less expected here was that we’d be seeing fake WiFi repeaters, but recently [Big Clive] got his hands on one and undertook the arduous task of reverse-engineering it.
The simple cardboard box which it comes in claims that it’s a 2.4 GHz unit that operates at 300 Mbps, which would be quite expected for the price. [Clive] obtained a real working WiFi repeater previously that did boast similar specifications and did indeed work. The dead giveaway that it is a fake are the clearly fake antennae, along with the fact that once you plug it in, no new WiFi network pops up or anything else.
Inside the case – which looks very similar to the genuine repeater – there is just a small PCB attached to the USB connector. On the PCB are a 20 Ohm resistor and a blue LED, which means that the LED is being completely overdriven as well and is likely to die quite rapidly. Considering that a WiFi repeater is supposed to require a setup procedure, it’s possible that these fake repeaters target an audience which does not quite understand what these devices are supposed to do, but they can also catch more informed buyers unaware who thought they were buying some of the cheap real ones. Caveat emptor, indeed.
The placebo effect is still an effect!
Snake oil salesman still around peddling junk
People buying Wish/Temu/Ali trash and saying it works without knowing how it works.
They think the “long noses” are dumb. And they seem to find enough of those that these cheats are worth at least trying it. SIGH!
Complete this sentence:
If it looks to good to be true, . . .
…then it must be good value
…It probably came from China.
…run away! RUN AWAY!!!
… then you could be learning many other interesting things as well from Scott Adams.
…now you have too problems.
It’s not a fake, it’s just a homeopathic wifi repeater.
Little does Clive know, there’s actually 0.0000000001% of a wi-fi jammer in these devices.
Great thread hhhh
My wife bought an air purifier that plugged in to a 12 volt cigarette lighter plug, and it turned out to be just a blue LED.
certainly helps “air out” your wallet…
Well, seems like the lighter plug is occupied with the air purifier, guess I won’t light that cigarette then…
Hey! The air purifier is working! It truly does reduce cigarette smoke!
Could be worse. It could have been an actual ionizing purifier. They produced just enough ozone to potentially make people sick (many caveats, small enclosed space type situations), but not enough ozone to actually do anything useful.
Oh jee whiz just say it how it is. the seller is cheating you and can’t be trusted! there is so much of this rubbish coming out of Peoples Republic of China.. We are stupid to entertain, and beat around the bush.
So many gullibles buy super discount products! I could sell my new fridges cardboard box as a mobile panic room If painted it beige and stamped a bogus CE tick and UL marking on it.!!
it’s a hard thing to gauge because a lot of times they’re real, just cheap. i remember i saw a bunch of USB flash drives with an unreasonable ratio of price per gigabyte, and they were pushed aggressively to me through advertising, and i looked into it (did not buy one) and they were obsolete tiny flash (like 32MB!) with some hack to misreport their size, but if you wrote to them they would not save the data.
but now i shop on temu (so i’m searching out these products, they aren’t initiating the contact with advertising), and generally i find that even the most outrageous deal is true. but with a bunch of caveats. for example, i’ve bought a couple of ridiculously underpriced android tablets that are exactly as described, with just a bit of ‘jankiness’ obviously from a lack of fine tuning / bug fixing (which seems inescapable with name brand stuff anyways). in some ways they’re better than the more expensive devices because they tend to be absolutely unlocked…no battle to unlock the bootloader and it comes with SuperSU or whatever installed out of the box!
so when they tell me they’ll sell me a $100 laptop with a ton of RAM and SSD but a 2016 low-end intel CPU…i tend to believe them.
anyways it makes me wonder if the scams are even originating in china. the supply chain is pretty hard for me to grok from the outside
On Aliexpress there was an item where they showed a photo of a full set of power tools for $5 or something like that. And when you buy it, they send you that photo.
$5 is the value is the cost of the lesson! You get what you pay for. China makes the full spectrum of quality. Price usually dictates quality. Unlike a Western attitude of shaving margin but keeping the product the same, from China they will agree to lower cost, but the product will change to suit the price.
In my experience, company East and West will cut corners to increase profit margin. I can’t think of a single “Western” company that hasn’t cut corners over the past 50 years.
I brought a battery. “Original”packaging. It had the word “original” boldly printed on the packet. It made me chuckle!
Nowadays most items on aliexpress can be bought with free returns for any reason in 14 days – the yellow ‘choice’ free shippping over $10 and the get 3 items bundle has it too. I already used it few times and it works. I just select ‘I no longer neeed it’, print a prepaid label and drop it at nearest depot. For some cheaper stuff (like $5) they just make a refund and let me keep it. The limit is said to be 3 items per month. So unlesss you get more than 3 fake items in a month it is OK.
Ebay sellers sometimes post an image of something like say, a string trimmer.
Don’t blithly click the $37 choice
Price in the ad is $37, but when you click the ad, the $37 is for a replacement part, not the trimmer.
You have to click through a handful of things to get to the actual trimmer unit. Then the actual trimmer costs $200.
I see many ebay listings being set up this way now. A picture of the expensive item but the displayed price is for a minor bit of something related. Always seems to an Asian vendor doing it.
Is there a word for this type of stuff yet? Seriously if we had something to call it maybe we could compain properly. I hate the fact that I can no longer search products according to price. I have to click on every single item and make sure to select the actual product with the proper color or size otherwise like you said, it may just be a replacement part or an accessory of some sort that the listed price is referring to.
It’s been like that forever. You’ve got a few $500 laptops, so you toss in a $2 USB cable to get your listing to the top of search (because we all sort by price).
Setting a minimum price (eg $400) could remove the cable option and put the laptops in the “correct” place, but currently just removes the entire listing. You could argue this is a good thing as it punishes the dodgy sellers, but as they keep doing it obviously no-one sets a minimum price.
Smarter search would know the laptop price range and filter out the crap, but search sucks and is getting worse for reasons I don’t understand.
I think you took an old story of a thing like that happening on ebay and transposed it to aliexpress to be popular-because-anti-china.
Sure there are fakes on aliexpress, but the picture ‘trick’ is not one that you find there AFAIK.
I wonder if NFT’s are also thought up based on that old ebay story :)
Look on the bright side, this WiFi repeater is not going to eat up airtime like the real ones 😆.
Also those arms are no proof of fake antenna, I have plenty legitimate devices with a PCB style antenna inside a plastic arm that look quite similar. (Granted most of them are from the B and G era)
Bigclive posted a video of a real but supercheap WiFi dongle a few days earlier and he was trying to find ways to ID the real ones from the fakes based on the case.
He tries to find fakes on purpose he says but too often the item are real and it turns out it’s not that easy to find fakes. You would think it was easier, but it seems not.