iPhone 3Gs: Counterfeits and Possible Exploit

According to our friends at the New Consumers Store, there seems to be some phony iPhone 3Gs roaming about in eBay and Craigslist. Not good news for potential iPhone 3G buyers.

It was great then that an eBay buyer went to Mac Medics, a Mac consultancy firm, and gave it to them to study it. Dana Stibolt then took a look at it and took a video of how you can spot a counterfeit iPhone 3Gs.

Here's a small list of what he found out:

• Delay in the reaction time
• Linux icon that goes nowhere
• Video icon that goes nowhere
• Add-ons that look weird: stylus for the iPhone 3Gs?
• Back of the fake is flat

After I shot the below video, I did test some of the other features on the unit. While the icons look very much like the real iPhone 3G, the features were not easy to navigate to. As you can in the video I tried to go back to the “Video” part of the iPod function, and I could not get that navigation link to work in the video. The unit also has a pretty decent FM radio in it. I was fooling around with the different functions and tried the FM radio, and it requested that I plug in headphones. It wanted the headphones in so they could act as the radio’s antenna.

For more details it's best to check out the video below:



We agree with what out friends at New Consumers Store said:

Be vigilant when buying an iPhone. It’s still better if you buy one from an Apple Store rather than from eBay or Craigslist. This way you can be positively sure that what you bought is the real McCoy.

Another piece of news that's been giving the iPhone a bad name is a suspected Short Message Service (SMS) vulnerability on the said phone. It's said that with the right SMS code sent to your iPhone hackers could literally take it over:

...the malicious code could theoretically include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet...

All of us are hoping that apple provides an OS update soon and close this gaping hole.

Source for iPhone counterfeit
Source for SMS exploit on the iPhone