Police of no help after man duped into buying counterfeit smartphone
Seven months ago, Jamie Klinger went to the police with what he believed was an open-and-shut case of fraud.
A woman posted an ad on Facebook offering a Samsung Galaxy phone for $550. Klinger reached out to the seller, met with her, handed over a fistful of cash and walked away with what he believed was a brand new phone.
There was only one problem: it was a knock-off.
“It looked right; the phone, the case, the screen, the interface were pretty spot on,” said 32-year-old Klinger.
“But the phone itself, the operating system, the camera, the features, were all basically garbage.”
Despite Klinger’s misfortune, he’d been savvy enough to keep a paper trail of the transaction.
Klinger had a copy of the Facebook ad offering a “perfect condition” Samsung Galaxy S8.
He’d also kept the Dec. 1 chat logs they used to set up a meeting outside Dépanneur Café in the Mile End.
After discovering he’d been duped, Klinger reached out to the seller on Facebook. She was evasive at first but eventually agreed to help Klinger dupe someone else into buying the phone.
When he refused to go along with it, she blocked him on Facebook and ignored his calls.
So when Klinger took his case to the police, he believed he had the seller dead to rights. He provided them with a 15-page document, complete with the chat logs, the woman’s name and the licence plate number of the bright blue compact car she drove to the meeting that day.
“I thought I’d done a good chunk of the work for them,” Klinger said. “But the cop I dealt with said this was pretty common and that they were backed up and the police report might just sit on a pile for months.”
The officer was right: six months after Klinger filed the complaint, the statute of limitations on his case ran out. Legally speaking, there was nothing police could do.
If the woman had, in fact, committed fraud, she’d got away with it rather easily.
A spokesperson for the Montreal police said it is against protocol to comment on specific investigations.
“I don’t think the woman who sold me the phone is running this scam on a bunch of people,” Klinger said. “It’s possible she was scammed and she just sort of paid it forward. I offered for us to work together with police if that was the case.
“She hasn’t responded to my messages in months.”
Counterfeiting Samsung ’s highend products is big business in China. Samsungs accounted for 43 per cent of the counterfeit market last year, badly outpacing competitors iPhone and Huawei.
This data comes from a study by Chinese mobile app Antutu, which scanned roughly seven million devices in the first six months of 2017. Among the millions of phones it diagnosed, it found that 2.96 per cent were fakes.
The most commonly copied models, at the time, were Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge, Samsung W2017 and Samsung W2016. Samsung is so commonly pirated because it uses open-sourced Android technology to run its operating system. It is relatively easy for criminals to mass produce a version of the operating system that passes for the real thing at first glance.
In Klinger’s case, he actually took the device to a Koodo store to have it activated on their mobile network.
“It fooled them, too,” Klinger said. “That’s how good it was.”
Looking back, there were a few telltale signs Klinger said he should have picked up on. For one, the seller seemed in a rush to off-load the device. Minutes after they began chatting, Klinger suggested they meet the following day.
“No, phone has to go now. Sorry,” she replied.
There are dozens of YouTube videos and articles outlining the ways a person can tell if a Samsung is the real deal. Klinger said the fail-safe is a free application called CPU-Z — which scans a phone’s circuiting and tells users exactly what lies inside the device.
“You can download it right there next to the seller, and it’ll tell you right away whether it’s the real thing,” Klinger said.
For now, Klinger is left with few options for remedy. Police told him he can pursue the matter in civil court, but without the seller’s home address, he cannot serve her with a legal notice.
He has considered hiring a private investigator to locate the woman, but once he pays him the $200 fee and covers his legal expenses, it likely won’t be worth the trouble.
“I’ve moved on. This doesn’t eat away at me, but there’s a principle at stake here,” Klinger said. “What if she’s out there doing this to other people?”