Have you ever encountered a fake product before? Maybe you found a designer handbag or some other product with a price that seemed too good to be true. Despite your concerns, you couldn’t pass up the opportunity – but when you took the item home, you discovered that it was actually counterfeit. Fake products are everywhere, and they’re far more common than you might think. Counterfeiting even affects the vaping industry.
You may have never considered the possibility of fake vapes before, and that’s precisely why they’re so common. Because vaping products are relatively inexpensive, people don’t look at them with a critical eye as they would with other types of products such as electronics and luxury goods. The fact that people aren’t paying close attention allows fake vapes to slip through unnoticed much of the time. Fake vapes are manufactured by the thousands every day, and they’re shipped to retailers around the world.
So, how worried should you be about fake vapes? More importantly, what can you do to avoid them? In this article, you’re going to learn everything you need to know about the counterfeit products that threaten to ruin your vaping experience.
Remember that the best way to avoid buying fake vapes is always to buy from a reliable seller. You can find authorized sellers of Innokin vapes near you by using our store locator, and you can also buy online from the official Innokin store.
What Are the Risks of Fake Vapes?
The most important thing to understand about fake vapes is that they’re illegal products. A fake vape uses a company’s trademark without permission and may not contain the proper nicotine warnings for the region in which it’s sold. In regions that have restrictions on the maximum nicotine strengths for vaping products, fake vapes may not abide by those restrictions. If a company has no issue with breaking the law, there is no reason to expect that company to care about your safety or the quality of your vaping experience – and as you can probably imagine, fake vapes have numerous potential issues in both of those areas.
User Experience Risks
First, let’s talk about the quality of your experience. Fake disposable vapes are some of the most common vaping devices in the world today, and that has a lot to do with how popular disposable vapes are. Because a disposable vape is a closed system, you can’t see what’s inside it. That means a fake disposable vape may be underfilled with e-liquid and may not actually deliver anywhere near the number of puffs stated in the package. The vape juice also most likely won’t taste the same as it would in an official device.
In any fake vape pen that has a built-in battery, there’s no way for you to know what the source of the battery is. The battery could be a factory reject, or it could be a used battery pulled out of another vaping device. Whether the product is a fake disposable vape or a rechargeable vaping device, it’s very unlikely that the battery will hold the same charge as the battery in a legitimate device.
Having a fake vape with a low-quality battery is also a serious potential safety issue. We’ll discuss that next.
Health and Safety Risks
The first reason why fake vapes are a major problem is because you’re not likely to have a good experience with a counterfeit device. You won’t be happy with your purchase, and you’ll be angry that you wasted your money. The much bigger issue, though, is the fact that fake vapes can actually be dangerous to use.
The biggest potential safety issue with fake disposable vapes and vape mods is the fact that, as we mentioned above, these devices aren’t likely to include the same top-quality battery cells that you’d find in legitimate products. The battery in a fake vape might be a used battery pulled from a discarded vaping device, or it could even be salvaged from a completely different product such as an old computer. The battery in a fake vape could be quite old and may have begun to break down internally. A severely degraded battery could be prone to overheating and may be dangerous to use.
Many vaping devices have built-in integrated circuits that automatically monitor for unsafe situations such as overheating and short circuits. if a dangerous condition exists, your vaping device should stop working and either blink or display an error message. A fake vape, however, may lack the integrated circuits or firmware necessary to ensure that you can vape safely.
A fake vaping device that includes e-liquid – such as a fake disposable vape – has another serious safety issue in that you don’t really know what you’re inhaling when you use the device. The vape juice may not have the nicotine strength stated on the package, and it could potentially contain unsafe additives. Remember – if the brand name on a vaping device is fake, there’s no reason for you to believe that the ingredient list is real. A fake vape could contain almost anything.
How Can You Identify a Fake Vape?
Some of the best initiatives to prevent fake vapes come from the vaping industry itself – and in a moment, we’ll explain what we’re doing here at Innokin to make sure that you won’t end up buying a counterfeit vaping product. For now, though, we’ll explain how you can avoid buying a fake vape by describing the typical characteristics of fake products.
So, how can you identify a fake vape? Here are some of the usual signs of a product that isn’t authentic.
Low-Quality Cardstock
One of the most common characteristics of fake vapes is that the packages often look old and beat up even though the products are new. That’s because the makers of fake devices often package the products in flimsy cardstock to cut costs.
Poor Print Quality
Another major difference between real and fake vapes is that the print quality on the fake products is often noticeably poorer compared to the legitimate products. That’s because the makers of fake products don’t have the original digital templates used to create the legitimate products. That means the counterfeiters have to either use scans of the original packages or try to recreate the digital assets from scratch. Either way, the packaging definitely won’t be the same. The package for a fake vape will often look blurry or washed out, or the fonts won’t be quite right.
Incorrect Nicotine Warning
In virtually all of the regions where vaping products are legal and regulated by the government, the products are required to display prominent nicotine warnings on their packages. Those warnings almost always look exactly the same from one product to the next. If a product has a nicotine warning that looks different – or it has no nicotine warning at all – it might be a fake vape.
Poor Fit and Finish
Disposable vapes are inexpensive and very popular – and because you’ll only use one for a few days before replacing it, you might be less likely to notice a fake disposable vape than other types of counterfeit vaping products. Fake disposable vapes are particularly for those reasons. Because they’re manufactured so cheaply, though, it’s particularly likely for fake disposable vapes to have issues with their fit and finish such as misaligned parts or peeling paint.
Doesn’t Taste or Feel Right
If there’s a particular vaping product that you buy on a regular basis – such as a certain disposable vape or e-liquid flavor – you’re going to know right away if you purchase a fake product because it won’t taste right. If you have any concerns about the authenticity of a product, you should also pay attention to the way you feel when using it. If anything doesn’t seem right, you should stop using the product immediately.
How Innokin Helps to Prevent Fake Vapes
Innokin is one of the vaping industry’s oldest manufacturers, and we’ve helped to pioneer the use of authentication codes to verify our products. You can view our device verification page now. When you want to check an authenticity code, you can also navigate manually to innokin.com, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Verify Device” link. We continually work to improve our device authentication process over the years and have used a few different types of codes during that time. Follow the instructions on the page to verify your device.
Do you have a product with an authentication code that has been checked many times? You should strongly consider not using the device, because that’s a likely sign of a counterfeit product.
You may have noticed that in many cases, a vaping product will have a QR code that you can scan to navigate directly to that company’s device authentication page. If you have any concerns about the authenticity of a device, though, we recommend navigating to the manufacturer’s website manually. That’s because some fake devices have fake QR codes. A fake QR code will send you to a website that’ll claim the device to be legitimate even though it isn’t.
