Fake Products are EVERYWHERE

I really like having tools, the more tools I have, the more capabilities I have at hand. I’m my family’s builder, carpenter, plumber, electrician, tech support, car mechanic and plenty more, so having tools that let me solve all those problems is rather helpful. One area I was somewhat lacking in was a good way to measure current, especially in mains wiring, but also higher DC current, say from a car’s battery. So I decided to solve that problem and bought one of the seemingly most popular models of clamp meter from ebay. This ‘holdpeak’ meter was just £30, and promises quite a lot. It claims it can measure both AC and DC current – something not all cheap meters can do – as well as act as a volt, capacitance, resistance, thermal probe meter. Hell it even does non-contact voltage detection where you hold the meter near to a live wire and it tells you where they are, really handy for DIY work to know you aren’t drilling into a live wire! It even offers “smart” app control via bluetooth, if you really care.

That laundry list of features actually isn’t all that crazy. Amazon sells an “Amazon Commercial” clamp meter that can be had for around £40 when it’s on sale that offers all the same features, minus the bluetooth anyway. I’m well aware that I’m not buying Fluke level accuracy or quality, but to get a rough idea I thought it’d be fine. I mean the multimeter I’ve been using for years now is a £10 one from Amazon. The pack of higher quality leads I bought cost as much as the meter, and yet it works perfectly fine. It’s not microvolt accurate, but I don’t need it to be. 

So, you can see why I thought spending £30 on a clamp meter seemed reasonable. So what’s the big deal here? Well my first giveaway was when I just turned it on and set it to measure current. In the ‘DC’ mode, it was reading an amp of DC current – with no cable clamped. Switching to the AC mode drops that to almost zero – maybe 100mA, but again that is with no cable in the clamp, so both should be zero. The next indication was when I decided to test it. I happen to have a kill-o-watt style plug energy meter, so I plugged my kettle into it and turned it on. It was drawing a little over 9A of current at 240V, but the clamp meter was only reading the same 0.2A it was when no cable was present. Sus.

I decided to ask ebay for a refund – this unit is clearly faulty, but, you know, stuff breaks. Especially cheap stuff like this, you’re bound to get a faulty unit sometimes. I submitted my evidence and waited a couple days. I then got an email saying I’d been refunded. Not that I had to ship it back, just that they’d issued me a refund. I thought that was a bit strange, and the burning desire to understand everything started getting the better of me. Since they didn’t want this back, I figured I should open it up to see what’s gone wrong in there. That answered a few questions and raised so, so many more.

Let me show you what’s in here. For context, here is what the inside of my el-cheapo multimeter (that works pretty well) looks like. This doesn’t do temperature or capacitance measurements, and of course doesn’t do non-contact current or voltage, although it does measure up to 10A of current through the second post. You’ve got a current shunt and op amp measurement circuit, a fuse for each input, a load of trimming resistors, and basically a PCB full of components. Now let’s look at the much more feature-rich clamp meter and.. Oh. Oh dear. 

First off, one of the terminal posts is fake. The COM port in the middle is fine, as is the lower voltage, capacitance and resistance port, but the high voltage port is lacking not only a metal insert to connect it to the board, there is nowhere on the board you could reasonably connect it to. It does have a bluetooth module, apparently from inet-tek.com in 2018, but it’s missing a fuse which is pretty bad. The PCB is basically empty, save for a bit of power regulation for the microcontroller under the blob, and two op amp chips right at the top of the board – on dual and one quad op amp chip specifically, both supposedly from Texas Instruments. I say “supposedly” there because fake chips are a pretty big problem right now and the markings don’t look like the right style to me. I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re fake.

While I’m not expecting to find a converging multi slope converter in here, but I’d have liked a functioning meter for my money. A peek inside the clamp itself reveals the black wire is just glued in – I assume this is for the non-contact voltage detection as AC can induce a magnetic field in a near wire like this, which the board can detect. The current measurement should be handled by this bit of laminated iron and what I have to assume are tiny four pin hall effect sensors soldered to this ribbon cable. It’s missing two chips at the top, which I’d imagine would be used for actually useful near-contact voltage measurement. 

So basically, this thing is a fake. What confuses me is why they went to all the effort of making a sort-of-functional product at all. Like it does technically do near contact voltage – even if you have to be literally touching the live wire – and I’m pretty sure it does at least sort of measure things like voltage, temperature and resistance. Like, if this was a scam where they cared about the money they’re making, why did they instantly refund me fully with no questions asked, no return needed? I get that a lot of people are going to buy these then likely not use them for long enough that they are outside the returns window, and might not have any other equipment to test against, but still. 

My only other guess there is the whole bluetooth and app control. Regardless of whether this meter actually worked, I would never have downloaded their app and connected it. That seems like a monumentally stupid thing to do – and I assume part of it is either to deliver malware or to scrape as much data as possible. Maybe it isn’t quite as malicious as that, but this whole thing isn’t sitting right with me. Maybe let me know in the comments what you think is going on here.

Funnily enough, in the same order I also bought a solar trickle charger for my car. I don’t drive it a whole lot, so I thought a little 10W 12V panel in the windshield would be great to keep the car topped up. I bought one for £20, and thought it best to check just how much power it was making. I connected my multimeter – the working one that is – and… even in direct sunlight it seemed to be DRAWING 6mA. Suspicious of this too, I checked the open circuit voltage. 0V. Huh. When connected, the panel had a tiny green LED on the back that was supposed to tell me if it was charging or not. 6mA seems like just about the right amount of current to run a green LED, don’t you think?

When I asked for a refund for that one too, ebay immediately spat out a return label for me. The seller then messaged me to try and gaslight me. They said you “can’t measure the current/voltage when testing with multimeter due to design issue”. How convenient – there is no way to prove the panel is outputting any power, just trust the LED bro. When I confirmed that that’s a load of BS, they told me that it isn’t designed for charging the battery fully and I can check if it’s working by – get this. Connecting the panel and seeing if the battery keeps its electricity when left sitting. You know, the thing that batteries do? My guess is that inside the little junction box in the back is just an LED and a resistor. The “solar panel” isn’t even connected to anything. 

Sadly I sent it back to get my money back, so I can’t take that one apart to find out, but it shows just how easy it is to fall for fake products. If I didn’t have all the tools I have, and an incredibly inquisitive mind, I wouldn’t have known that the solar panel was a fake, and while I might have figured out that the clamp meter was a fake too, I wouldn’t have had the pretty irrefutable evidence to get them to give me my money back. I really wish there was a robust system on platforms like ebay to report and remove fake products like these – and the same goes for Amazon. Fake products, outright scams and even insanely harmful products like radioactive “wellness” products can still be found in their droves. The only advice I have is to look for name brands where possible, if a deal looks too good to be true – which neither of these did – then obviously use caution, and if you can arm yourself with tools to check if what you buy actually works as described – but it really shouldn’t be up to you to do that. You should be able to trust that what you buy works as advertised, and I’d really like to see platforms like ebay and Amazon do better.