Buying a fake to resell is one of the worst feelings in this hobby. You think you scored a $120 Milwaukee battery pack for $40, and it turns out to be a counterfeit that won't hold a charge, can't be sold honestly, and might catch fire in your garage. The good news is that most fakes give themselves away in the photos if you know the tells. Here's what I check before I get excited.
The price is the first tell
Counterfeits almost always come in too cheap. A brand-new sealed pair of $200 sneakers for $55, a "genuine" DeWalt battery four-pack for the price of one. The forger's whole business is undercutting the real thing, so a price that's way better than every sold comp isn't luck, it's a warning. It doesn't prove a fake, but it's the flag that tells you to look harder at everything else.
Read the logo and the font
This is where knockoffs fall apart. Zoom into the branding and compare it to a real product photo pulled up in another tab. Look for slightly-off fonts, wrong spacing, a logo that's a hair too fat or too thin, colors that aren't quite right. Real manufacturers are obsessive about their logo. Counterfeiters are working from a copy of a copy, and it shows in the little stuff.
Check the parts that are expensive to fake right
Forgers cut corners where you're least likely to look:
- The charger and cables. A genuine tool with a suspiciously generic charger, or a phone with a cable that's the wrong length and weight, is a common tell. The accessory is where the fake shows.
- Stitching and hardware on bags, shoes, and jackets. Real brands have even, tight stitching and solid zippers. Fakes go crooked and flimsy.
- Weight and feel, which you can sometimes read from how a seller describes it. Cheap materials feel light and hollow, and honest sellers of fakes will often say so without meaning to.
- Serial numbers and date codes. Many brands let you verify a serial. A missing, blurry, or "won't photograph it" serial is a red flag on electronics and designer goods.
Watch how the seller talks about it
The words matter as much as the pictures. "Authentic," "100% real," and "unauthorized authentic" typed unprompted are things sellers of genuine items rarely feel the need to say. "Works great" with no photo of it powered on is a claim, not proof. And a stock photo instead of a real one, or the same photo you can reverse-image-search to ten other listings, means you have no idea what you're actually buying.
When in doubt, price it like a fake
If you genuinely can't tell and the deal's still tempting, offer what it'd be worth if it turned out to be a knockoff or a dud. If the seller balks, you walked away from a fake. If they take it, you've capped your downside. This is the same "assume the worst until proven otherwise" habit that keeps you out of trouble on condition generally, which I get into in "is it worth flipping?".
A second set of eyes on every listing
You can't run this whole check on hundreds of listings a day, and that's the problem. Worth Radar reads each listing's photos and description, flags the contradictions and too-good-to-be-true pricing that usually mean trouble, and weighs it against real sold comps, so the sketchy ones get sorted out before you waste a drive on them.