Be careful when buying a MacBook. High-tech offline fraud
Good all the time of day dear friends. For a long time I did not write on Habré and it is very a pity that my new publication concerns scams. And not just fraudsters, about whom I read somewhere, but about fraudsters who personally deceived me.
The purpose of this article is to publish a rather cunning and not trivial type of fraud, which I came across just last week. The case is now in the investigative department, so I will immediately disappoint detectives lovers: I will not divulge the details of the investigation and the details of the case. Only after the case is closed.
The second goal is to find those who have been deceived by me, in order to receive compensation and sew one more / two / three statements to the case.
As you guessed, the criminals were found (looking ahead, I will say that this happened naturally without the help of the police). About what to fear when buying a new or used MacBook, as well as how the criminals were found and caught, read under the cut.
')
I'll start with the lyrics. A year ago, I bought myself an Apple Thunderbolt Display and found that my MacBook Pro does not work with it because it has a Mini Display Port. Although the connector is absolutely identical, the DP-> TB bundle does not work, but on the contrary, TB-> DP works fine. In general, at this moment, not only I was so deceived, there was quite a serious confusion with this compatibility, and even consultants from the Sydney Apple Store argued that a new Apple Display could be connected to the DisplayPort connector. But this is absolutely not true, compatibility is only in the opposite direction. I was annoyed by this fact and changed with my wife (she had a Macbook Air 13 2011) laptops.
Then I was just amazed at the performance and usability of the Air: the screen resolution was like 15, Xcode worked quickly, there was no memory shortage at all even with 4 GB of RAM and even worked fine in Windows 7 running in parallels. Then I threw away the thought of buying a new MacBook and decided to wait for something new, I was hoping for 15 inch air.
A year has passed and Apple released the Macbook Pro 15 Retina, and I realized that I needed to take it.
Naturally, at the beginning of sales, I did not buy it, since it was during this period that there were no trips to countries where it could be bought, and there was no desire to overpay the starting cheat.
It was still aggravated by the fact that I needed a lot of RAM (after all, 4GB on the Air later became not enough). Therefore, I did not want the standard 975 or 976 model, because the memory had become soldered and it was no longer possible to upgrade it (by normal human means without soldering).
It so happened that with 16 GB we only sell the most top-of-the-line model, sometimes intermediate models with such a volume of RAM slipped, but they quickly sold out.
Therefore, I did not hurry too much, planning to buy this unit during a winter trip to Europe.
But then I came across one ad on Avito.ru when I was searching for an iPhone 5 (clickable):
I am very positive about used equipment, as this is a good way to save (albeit a risky one). In any case, online, you can check the expiration date of the warranty and if something is wrong with it - you can take it to the warranty service center.
A Retina Macbook is not a completely unambiguous device (not many applications are still adapted), so it is likely that someone bought, tried and did not like it. Well, a big plus - the American layout and the lack of engraving.
I really liked it and I called the seller.
Met in a large shopping center, the guys came together. Immediately, their behavior seemed strange to me, but honestly, one can say that half of the residents of the capital have very strange behavior.
I opened the laptop, it was in good condition. Launched the “About this Mac” application, launched the “system_profiler” command in the console. These are the tools that I was confident and trusted them. Everything told me that this is the top custom configuration: 2.7 / 16/768.
Nothing remarkable, everything went fine.
At home, I began to restore the system from my time machine and at the initial stage of the installation, the MacBook told me that I had a 256 Gig drive at my disposal. Here I thought hard. I ran the Apple Hardware test (when starting the system, you need to hold down the “D” key) and found this:
As you can see it turned out to be just the youngest model.
I was very interested in how it happened. After half an hour, I completely figured out how to make this kind of transformation. And before that, I was completely confident in the above utilities (“About this Mac” and “system_profiler”), for which I paid.
What we have: I bought a top 15-inch MacBook, the price of a new retail is 120-130 thousand rubles. I received the youngest model, the price in retail for a new copy is 60 thousand rubles. In total, I estimate my damage at 50 thousand rubles: the market price of a used model of such a model is about 50 tr., I bought it for 100 tr.
The rest of the laptop was very well maintained, was activated on September 27 and is on the official guarantee.
And now the pictures of what the deception looks like:
The stickers on the box were also faked, very difficult to distinguish from the original. The serial matches:
But on this screenshot you can see that in the detailed information there is no information about the processor, memory and disks. I did not pay attention to it - this is my mistake number 1.
My second fatal error was that I did not look carefully at the beginning of the output of the “system_profiler” command. This utility and so gives a lot of text on the output, but I did not pay attention to two important lines that were lost among the total amount of information:
— , Apple Hardware Test.
, , . , . .
, :
1. Apple Hardware Test. : , , «D». . — . , :
2. Apple, .
, ( ). , ( ). « » , . -, , .
, , .
, , . , . , .
« » . , . .
, .
The purpose of this article is to publish a rather cunning and not trivial type of fraud, which I came across just last week. The case is now in the investigative department, so I will immediately disappoint detectives lovers: I will not divulge the details of the investigation and the details of the case. Only after the case is closed.
The second goal is to find those who have been deceived by me, in order to receive compensation and sew one more / two / three statements to the case.
As you guessed, the criminals were found (looking ahead, I will say that this happened naturally without the help of the police). About what to fear when buying a new or used MacBook, as well as how the criminals were found and caught, read under the cut.
')
Prehistory
I'll start with the lyrics. A year ago, I bought myself an Apple Thunderbolt Display and found that my MacBook Pro does not work with it because it has a Mini Display Port. Although the connector is absolutely identical, the DP-> TB bundle does not work, but on the contrary, TB-> DP works fine. In general, at this moment, not only I was so deceived, there was quite a serious confusion with this compatibility, and even consultants from the Sydney Apple Store argued that a new Apple Display could be connected to the DisplayPort connector. But this is absolutely not true, compatibility is only in the opposite direction. I was annoyed by this fact and changed with my wife (she had a Macbook Air 13 2011) laptops.
Then I was just amazed at the performance and usability of the Air: the screen resolution was like 15, Xcode worked quickly, there was no memory shortage at all even with 4 GB of RAM and even worked fine in Windows 7 running in parallels. Then I threw away the thought of buying a new MacBook and decided to wait for something new, I was hoping for 15 inch air.
A year has passed and Apple released the Macbook Pro 15 Retina, and I realized that I needed to take it.
Outset
Naturally, at the beginning of sales, I did not buy it, since it was during this period that there were no trips to countries where it could be bought, and there was no desire to overpay the starting cheat.
It was still aggravated by the fact that I needed a lot of RAM (after all, 4GB on the Air later became not enough). Therefore, I did not want the standard 975 or 976 model, because the memory had become soldered and it was no longer possible to upgrade it (by normal human means without soldering).
It so happened that with 16 GB we only sell the most top-of-the-line model, sometimes intermediate models with such a volume of RAM slipped, but they quickly sold out.
Therefore, I did not hurry too much, planning to buy this unit during a winter trip to Europe.
Start
But then I came across one ad on Avito.ru when I was searching for an iPhone 5 (clickable):
I am very positive about used equipment, as this is a good way to save (albeit a risky one). In any case, online, you can check the expiration date of the warranty and if something is wrong with it - you can take it to the warranty service center.
A Retina Macbook is not a completely unambiguous device (not many applications are still adapted), so it is likely that someone bought, tried and did not like it. Well, a big plus - the American layout and the lack of engraving.
I really liked it and I called the seller.
Purchase
Met in a large shopping center, the guys came together. Immediately, their behavior seemed strange to me, but honestly, one can say that half of the residents of the capital have very strange behavior.
I opened the laptop, it was in good condition. Launched the “About this Mac” application, launched the “system_profiler” command in the console. These are the tools that I was confident and trusted them. Everything told me that this is the top custom configuration: 2.7 / 16/768.
Nothing remarkable, everything went fine.
How I discovered the catch
At home, I began to restore the system from my time machine and at the initial stage of the installation, the MacBook told me that I had a 256 Gig drive at my disposal. Here I thought hard. I ran the Apple Hardware test (when starting the system, you need to hold down the “D” key) and found this:
As you can see it turned out to be just the youngest model.
The essence of deception
I was very interested in how it happened. After half an hour, I completely figured out how to make this kind of transformation. And before that, I was completely confident in the above utilities (“About this Mac” and “system_profiler”), for which I paid.
What we have: I bought a top 15-inch MacBook, the price of a new retail is 120-130 thousand rubles. I received the youngest model, the price in retail for a new copy is 60 thousand rubles. In total, I estimate my damage at 50 thousand rubles: the market price of a used model of such a model is about 50 tr., I bought it for 100 tr.
The rest of the laptop was very well maintained, was activated on September 27 and is on the official guarantee.
And now the pictures of what the deception looks like:
The stickers on the box were also faked, very difficult to distinguish from the original. The serial matches:
But on this screenshot you can see that in the detailed information there is no information about the processor, memory and disks. I did not pay attention to it - this is my mistake number 1.
My second fatal error was that I did not look carefully at the beginning of the output of the “system_profiler” command. This utility and so gives a lot of text on the output, but I did not pay attention to two important lines that were lost among the total amount of information:
system_profiler
2012-11-09 12:02:58.557 system_profiler[289:707] Error loading /System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPMemoryReporter.spreporter: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4 "The bundle “SPMemoryReporter” couldn’t be loaded because its executable couldn’t be located." UserInfo=0x7f943b2165e0 {NSLocalizedFailureReason=The bundle’s executable couldn’t be located., NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestion=Try reinstalling the bundle., NSBundlePath=/System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPMemoryReporter.spreporter, NSLocalizedDescription=The bundle “SPMemoryReporter” couldn’t be loaded because its executable couldn’t be located.}
2012-11-09 12:02:58.579 system_profiler[289:707] Error loading /System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPPlatformReporter.spreporter: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4 "The bundle “SPPlatformReporter” couldn’t be loaded because its executable couldn’t be located." UserInfo=0x7f943b011c20 {NSLocalizedFailureReason=The bundle’s executable couldn’t be located., NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestion=Try reinstalling the bundle., NSBundlePath=/System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPPlatformReporter.spreporter, NSLocalizedDescription=The bundle “SPPlatformReporter” couldn’t be loaded because its executable couldn’t be located.}
— , Apple Hardware Test.
, , . , . .
, :
1. Apple Hardware Test. : , , «D». . — . , :
4SNS/1/40000001:ID0R-0.000.
2. Apple, .
, ( ). , ( ). « » , . -, , .
, , .
, , . , . , .
...
« » . , . .
, .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/157969/
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