Do not fall for the low price phones scam on aliexpress.com

Today, I would like to share my experience of buying a phone on aliexpress.com with you and give you a few ideas to guide you on what kinds of phones you may avoid buying on aliexpress.com.

A brief background of my online shopping journey

I have been shopping on aliexpress.com since 2016. In fact, the exact date of my first order on aliexpress.com was May 9, 2016. Before this, I had made extensive research on buying online, so I had equipped myself with knowledge of the pros and cons, as well as the benefits and the dangers of buying online. I understood that there were dangers such as sellers not sending you any product, or sending you wrong or fake product, after you had paid for it. Since this post is not about buying online in general, I’ll dive straight into the subject of this post.

Summary of my experience with buying a phone on aliexpress.com

My experience could be considered as the seller sending me both a wrong and a fake product. I say this because the phone that I received was usable (just not by me) but was way different in specifications from what was advertized, and ultimately lacking in the expected performance. This situation is what aliexpress.com and other online shops and marketplaces refer to as “item not as described”.

How the phone scam on aliexpress.com all started

Once I saw that my current phone was nearing it’s end of life, I decided to find a replacement before it died on me one day. So, off I went to aliexpress.com to see if I could find a good deal on a phone. Yes, I did find a “good deal” but it didn’t turn out to be so good a deal. The phone I found which appeared to have the best value for money was called S24 Ultra. I cannot retrieve the product listing because the seller’s shop shut down shortly before or after I received the phone, and the product listing is no longer available. But below is an image of a similar listing available on aliexpress.com at the time of publishing this post.

As you can see in the bottom right corner of the product image, the chipset is purported to be a snapdragon 8 gen 1. The phone I bought claimed to have a snapdragon 8 gen 2.

Note that the seller had clearly stated in the product description that the phone had nothing to do with Samsung, so I knew that I wasn’t buying a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. However, with the provided specifications, I expected a phone with at least half the performance of a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. I was convinced about this because of the reviews by other buyers of the phone from that seller. At the time I placed my order, there had been 60 reviews in total for the product, and all of them were 5 star. I even took the pain to go through all the reviews where the buyers described their experience with the phone. Some buyers described it as a phone with flagship performance at a fraction of the cost. Based on these reviews, I thought I had hit the jackpot.

How did the S24 Ultra compare with Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra?

I’m going to look at this comparison in terms of the key and most relevant specifications.

	Galaxy S24 Ultra	S24 Ultra Claimed	S24 Ultra Actual
Chipset	Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3	Snapdragon 8 Gen 2	Q888+
CPU Cores	8	10	4
Core speed (GHz)	3.39, 3.1, 2.9, 2.2	–	1.3
OS	Android 14	Android 13	Android 8
Network	5G	5G	4G
RAM (GB)	12	12	2
Storage	Up to 1 TB	256 GB	12 GB
Main Camera	Up to 200 MP	64 MP	4.92 MP
Battery Capacity	5000 mAh	6800 mAh	2600 mAh

Note that some of the claimed specifications will show up in the phone settings exactly as claimed, but when a system analysis programme is used to check the specifications, you see that the real values are different from those shown in the settings.

How I discovered that the phone I bought on aliexpress.com was fake

Once I received the phone, I began to transfer WhatsApp to it and install other apps. The first sign of trouble was when I decided to copy all my WhatsApp data to the new phone. The data was less than 7 GB but the phone complained of insufficient space. How could a phone that claimed to have 256 GB storage and showing over 230 GB free space in the file manager not have enough space to take less than 7 GB of data? At first I thought it was just a temporary glitch, so I went ahead and transferred only the databases. Then I faced various challenges restoring my WhatsApp database until I discovered that the storage location of WhatsApp was that of android 8 or earlier, rather than android 10 or later. Yet I just thought that the android developers had changed the WhatsApp storage location back to pre-android 10, since this was my first time interacting with android 13. At a point, I had to factory-reset the phone and start over, hoping that any malfunctioning would be corrected.

After finally managing to restore my data to the new phone, I installed all the needed apps overnight using the cheaper midnight data bundle. All this while, the installations progressed frustratingly slowly. Below is a video comparison I made between the installation speed on the new phone and my old phone that was supposed to be much inferior. It took 2 minutes 50 seconds to install an app on the new phone that took only 15 seconds to install on my old phone.

All the above experiences with the phone led me to believe that something major was wrong with it, so I installed an app called CPU X and checked the actual system specifications. That was when I discovered the actual system specifications as presented in the table above.

Now that you know that all that glitters is not gold when it comes to buying phones on aliexpress.com, I want to outline a few tips to help you reduce the chance of being scammed if you decide to buy a phone on aliexpress.com.

1. Compare prices: This is probably the most concrete way to greatly minimize the chances of being scammed when buying a phone on aliexpress.com. Always compare the price of the target phone with prices of known brand phones of similar specifications. Note that this phone was unbranded, simply called S24 Ultra, mimicking Samsung galaxy S24 Ultra. Such are the phones with the absurdly low prices. If the price difference between the target phone and the branded phone is too big, then the target phone is definitely not what it is advertized to be.
   
   For example, while I paid ghs 793.31 (phone+shipping) for this unbranded phone, there’s a Samsung galaxy S22 Ultra (I couldn’t find a S24 Ultra on aliexpress.com at the time of publishing this post), the older sibling of the Samsung phone being mimicked that is being sold at ghs 7,722.21 (excluding exchange rates and money transfer charges, which will increase the final amount paid). With such a huge gap in price, you should not expect anything from the unbranded phone remotely near the actual specifications and performance of the branded phone. Phones from other know brands of similar specifications as the unbranded phone are going for more than 8x the price on the same aliexpress.com.
   
   Note that this is not an endorsement that all of the expensive phones on aliexpress.com are genuine, or that all sellers on aliexpress.com who sell expensive phones are genuine.
2. Do not be deceived by the sellers ratings and reviews: Price is probably the most concrete check you can use to avoid being scammed when buying a phone on aliexpress.com. One other thing that misleads buyers is the seller’s aliexpress.com rating and reviews. This particular seller had a high aliexpress.com rating and a lot of followers. In addition, the product had 60 reviews at the time I placed my order, and all of them were 5 star, yet the phone being sold was fake. Shortly, before or after I received the phone, the shop was emptied of all products. My guess is that it was shut down by aliexpress.com for fraud.
3. Do not be deceived by the seller’s friendliness: In fact, this seller was the most friendly and most responsive seller I had dealt with on aliexpress.com up to the time of publishing this post. He responded quickly to all my questions, and in a very friendly manner, always addressing me as “friend”. Even when I mistakenly placed the order for S23 Ultra instead of S24 Ultra, he agreed to send me the S24 Ultra without taking the price difference between the two phones (the S24 Ultra was more expensive by over $7). With this kind of service and understanding, there was no doubt in my mind that this seller was genuine. However, the red flag of the price should have put me on red alert.

Good news: I was able to get a refund from AliExpress

Even though this was a deal gone wrong, it wasn’t a complete loss. I activated aliexpress.com’s refund policy and was able to get a refund of 80% while keeping the phone. At first the seller asked me to return the phone for full refund. When I rejected it, he offered 50% refund while I kept the phone. I again rejected his offer and rather demanded 80% refund while I kept the phone, which he agreed to. Note that even though I was refunded 80% in dollar value, it didn’t translate into 80% in cedi value, because of exchange rates and money transfer charges.

I have since sold the new phone at a fraction of my investment to a beginner smartphone user. Apart from time wasted, it wasn’t a loss for me since the sale enabled me to recover all of my monetary investment on the phone.

Conclusion

In conclusion, even though shopping on aliexpress.com can be money-saving, or can help you get goods you normally would not have got, you need to look out for extreme price difference for similar products, especially phones. This is one of the the most concrete ways to identify likely scam sales when buying phones on aliexpress.com.