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I've seen a couple of "genuine" and "original" products on ebay, which are most probably counterfeit. Most notable are the Hoya filters and Canon batteries, whose price tags are at about 15-50 percent of the retail price. (I'm not talking about third-party products here, I'm talking about falsely branded stuff.)

Googling suggests that they indeed are counterfeit, but it does take some time to find out, and the information is scattered all over the interwebs.

I know that a question asking for a list of fake products is not exactly conforming to the Q+A format, but would it be appropriate as a community wiki?

Related: Would splitting the list into separate questions, such as "Is this battery I found on ebay genuine?", be considered too localized?

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I really don't think these lists work, and Community Wiki actually makes it worse. There is no incentive to maintain the answers.

But, "How do I spot a counterfeit SD card?" would be fine. This could even be more specific for some things — "How do I spot a counterfeit Nikon battery?"

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  • Ok, I thought this might be the case. I'll refrain from posting it. On a side note, the CW idea comes from the way they do it on math.SE, where questions that don't have one definite answer (with tags soft-question or big-list) get wikified (instead of closed) if they're considered on-topic enough. I guess this place is run slightly differently, and that's probably a good thing. – Daniel R Feb 26 '14 at 14:41
  • @DanielR Yeah, we have some posts like that, but they tend to a) not really get great answers, b) definitely don't get comprehensive answers, and c) very quickly turn into big unmaintainable messes. They still get a lot of views, though, which means that many visitors are lured in by a question which looks interesting, but usually actually would be better finding the information elsewhere. So, I'd like to avoid creating more such things. Personally, I'd like to close most of the ones we have, but I think I'm in the minority there. – mattdm Feb 27 '14 at 1:10
  • Right, I get your point(s). – Daniel R Feb 27 '14 at 8:08

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