Caveat Emptor Ebay

In the market for a second battery for my Canon 30D, I happened across an article in the September 2007 Popular Photography about counterfeit camera items. According to the article, not only are most of the batteries, memory cards, and ink cartridges sold on ebay are counterfeit, but some sources of these fake items represent “a significant tributary of funding for terrorism.” Huh? Now Al Qaeda is buying weapons with money we send them in exchange for fake camera batteries?

Yes indeed, according to the Department of Homeland Security and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center via Pop Photo.

That tastes a bit salty to me, but there are certainly other, more verifiable reasons to make sure you’re buying genuine equipment for your cameras and printers. Imagine that your new ebay bargain battery works fine until you smell smoke coming from your camera and find it’s a molten write off? Or your new 4-gig compact flash card for some reason only holds 2 gigs of data? Or worse, the new card stops working just as you take the shot that will finally get you on the cover of National Geographic?

Canon buys samples of their own goods on ebay to test for authenticity and found that: “Sixteen of the 29 batteries [Canon] bought in the first six months were fakes.” Ebay’s own resources section has tips on how to spot fake items, from small differences in the molding to the more obvious lack of a serial number printed on the item. Of course, by the time you have the item to inspect for fakery, the scammer has your money.

Apparently the Midnight Run is largely to thank for this overabundance of fake stuff we want. Imagine that you operate a production line somewhere in Asia making memory cards. One day a week your supervisor goes home a bit earlier than usual, so you have your friend meet you at the back of the plant with his van at midnight, by which time you’ve rushed through several cases of 1 gig cards sporting 2 gig labels, and you haven’t been as conscientious as you are when your product will have to go through the company’s quality control. You’re working for speed and quick profit on the gray market. Your goods are ‘genuine’ in that they come from the real factory. But they aren’t the real deal. Not that the cousin who’s going to unload them on ebay for a great price and huge profit for you is going to care. And not that the sucker who thinks he got a great deal on ebay is going to come looking for you.

There are opportunities to get deal and save money, but I’m not going to shop for my new battery on ebay.