Some gamers have been burned by bootleg games unwittingly purchased on Ebay, warns Aeropause.

Writer Stephen Munn reports a recent scam to which he fell victim:

I was thinking about that Harmony of Dissonance cartridge that failed on me not so long ago, and how strange it was to open the thing up and find the battery soldered to the board. I only had a very passing understanding of what a bootleg GBA cartridge looks like at the time... A failed battery is a common sign of a bootleg game, but there are more specific ways to tell while the game is still working. Unfortunately, these things don’t tend to leap out at you in an auction listing, but there are a few things that are a clear tipoff that something’s not right.

Munn advises would-be Ebay game buyers to:

• Look closely at the label... ripoffs tend to look like ripoffs. Know what the label on the cartridge is supposed to look like before you go shopping, and make sure you’re looking at an exact match. If there’s no picture, it’s suspect. If it’s a stock picture, it’s suspect.
• Does it come with the box and manual?
• Where’s it coming from? If the seller is in a country where it doesn’t make sense to be selling an English-language version of the game...it’s almost certainly counterfeit.
• Look over the seller’s feedback for any sign of people complaining they received a counterfeit game.

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