One of the least talked about scams in the mobile industry has resellers buzzing, but strangely no mobile company is willing to look it in the eye! We unearthed some real shocking facts in the mobile phone racket and here is the dope fresh off the stables. Sources from the gray market willingly displayed the difference between fake and original phones, while authorized dealers, Sony and Nokia representatives and those who pleaded anonymity, well… almost all, confirmed the same! Read on…

The racket runs something like this -
Industry sources tell us that “importers or wholesalers” have agents based in China who inform them about the latest mobile phones manufactured in clandestine factories, packaged and boxed and ready to be sold as the original. These naturally come at dirt cheap prices, but mind you, when sold to the unsuspecting customer, the price is obviously at a premium and as the original.

Most “copies” have lesser features than the ones specified in the original model and on a closer look, these phones look like they have been made of substandard plastics and have a cheap look and feel to it. Moreover in terms of camera quality, a layperson will not realize that the camera in the phone would be of a lower resolution than the one he has paid for. The phone he has just purchased from the market might just have a 1.3 mega pixel camera when on the packet it says 2 mega pixel. Such mobile phones get sold in the gray market - ‘without the bill’. That’s why you will never get hold of a sealed packet in the gray market.

Another recent development, which is even more shocking, is that these unbranded phones packed as Nokia and Sony phones have found their way in the so-called authorized dealer stores. They are commonly referred to as ‘china ka phones’. One Nokia dealer at Protronics, Lamington Road told us that till a while ago sometime back he would stock and sell these phones. “The market for these mobile phones is quite lucrative. Some of them are packaged and sold as Nokia phones. These phones have the same look and feel of the original but we realized that their shelf lives are short-lived. We got way too many customer complaints and because of the ill-reputation it was bringing us, we stopped stocking the fakes.”