Cloning and Counterfeiting in the Vaping Industry
When you invest in vaping hardware and e-liquids, you should purchase advisedly.
Naturally, you will be looking to buy the right products for your needs and at reasonable prices. But sometimes low prices are too good to be true. It's important that you spend your hard earned cash on genuine products that are safe.
If you’re new to vaping, you may not realise that cloning and counterfeiting are rampant in the vaping industry. For a long time, cloning was accepted by many as a semi-legitimate practice. The product clones gave consumers the ability to purchase functionally equivalent versions of very expensive products at more affordable prices.
But the nature of product cloning has changed. It has become something very different today. Many of the available products are not clones.
Clones are identical copies of products. Fakes are substandard approximations.
These days, the black market is awash with fakes that are designed to deceive and that are often dangerous. They are the very definition of false economies.
The best way to keep yourself safe as a consumer and not to waste money is to buy only from reliable and established vape shops that you trust.
A brief history of cloning in the vaping industry
To see why cloning became such a common practice in the vaping industry, you need to understand what was considered a high-end product when vaping first began.
Mechanical mods were all the rage in those days because they offered dramatically more power and satisfaction than the small cigalikes that were pretty much the only available alternatives at the time.
The mechanical mod was an invention of the vaping community. Vapers were the ones who created the first mechanical mods, and small businesses in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe were the first companies to build mechanical mods for the mass market.
Rebuildable atomizers and mechanical mods were some of the most commonly cloned products in the early years of the vaping industry.
The first commercial mechanical mods were bona fide luxury devices. They were machined to perfection from top-quality materials such as copper, brass and stainless-steel alloys.
Being precision devices made by small business owners who expected fair compensation for their efforts, these mechanical mods often cost hundreds of pounds each. They were frequently paired with precision-made rebuildable atomizers that were equally costly. Anyone seeking to use a really nice mechanical mod setup could easily spend £300 or more. While enthusiasts loved their high-end vaping equipment, the prices were much higher than what most people could afford to spend on vape gear.
After all, most people turned to vaping in order to stop smoking. There have always been many good reasons to quit smoking and one of them is to save money!
Product cloning has always been common in the Chinese manufacturing industry. The factories in Shenzhen can develop, prototype and mass-produce products at an extremely rapid pace, and they can sell those products at highly affordable prices while remaining profitable. When it became evident that mechanical mods and rebuildable atomizers were great products to sell, Chinese factories immediately began producing functional copies of those products and selling them at a fifth of the price.
That was the beginning of the end for small-scale mechanical mod production in the western world. Today, “honest” product cloning no longer really exists in the vaping industry in the way it once did. Many of the manufacturers that got started in the industry by producing clones have since moved on to developing their own original vaping products or have switched to entirely different industries. Other manufacturers, however, switched to “cloning” of a different kind.
Counterfeit vape gear is big business now
Between the age of the mechanical mod and now, one thing changed fundamentally about the vaping industry: It became very, very big. The biggest brands in the industry have extremely large customer bases and are valued in the hundreds of millions of pounds. A dishonest company can stand to make very large profits by taking advantage of the vaping industry’s biggest brands and selling fake versions of those companies’ products.
Fake hardware now proliferates and the situation could get worse following the ban on disposables in the UK.
The counterfeit products that British vapers should be most concerned about are coils for sub-ohm tanks. Fake vape coils do exist; that’s why most of the major coil manufacturers employ anti-counterfeiting measures. However, those measures aren’t entirely unbeatable. Some manufacturers of knockoff coils will even put fake anti-counterfeit codes on the boxes, knowing that most people never bother to check authenticity codes.
Why are fake and counterfeit vaping products potentially dangerous?
The reason why counterfeit vaping products are so potentially dangerous is that when a company has no regard for the law, you really have no idea what they are putting in their products - and it is unlikely to be of the finest quality.
We saw the results of this in 2019 when thousands of people in the United States were sickened by EVALI, a debilitating lung illness resulting from the use of Vitamin E acetate to dilute black market cannabis vape cartridges.
While there’s no real incentive to add random chemicals to nicotine e-liquids because the ingredients needed to produce e-liquid are so inexpensive, you should nevertheless remain vigilant when buying vape juice.
Although it’s always important to make sure that you’re buying authentic vape juice, the more immediate safety concern is the possibility of counterfeit coils. While the ingredients needed to make e-liquid are inexpensive, the materials needed to make vape coils definitely aren’t. The costs of stainless-steel enclosures, organic cotton, silicone o-rings and gold-plated pins add up. That’s why vape coils aren’t cheap, and that’s why factories have a financial incentive to produce fake coils.
It’s safe to assume that fake coils don’t go through the same rigorous testing as authentic coils and a coil with a manufacturing fault can potentially deliver serious safety issues such as short circuits.
Fake Batteries Present an Immediate Danger to Vapers
The proliferation of fake batteries is also a safety issue that merits special concern, and counterfeit batteries aren’t unique to the vaping industry. Lithium-ion batteries such as the popular 18650 cell often have no anti-counterfeiting measures at all, and the only thing visually separating one brand from the next is the printed heat-shrink tubing on the outside of the cell.
Anyone can print a logo in a plastic tube, and that makes the production and sale of fake batteries something that’s surprisingly easy to do.
You do not want your next vaping battery to come out of this pile.
Where do fake batteries come from? Mostly, they come from older notebook computers. People buy the computers, break open the battery packs and test the cells inside. If the cells hold a charge, they’re wrapped in heat-shrink tubing and sold as if they were new batteries.
If someone who uses a low-drain device such as a flashlight buys a fake battery, it may not be a safety issue. Old laptop cells, however, definitely aren’t appropriate for vaping and are potentially hazardous.
To vape safely, always buy from a vape shop you trust
It is absolutely crucial that you always buy vape gear from a store you trust. A reliable vape shop always purchases its stock directly from the original manufacturers or from authorised distributors.