This battery is for my Sony FDR-AX53 video camera. If you buy something similar, you should check on yours because it might not be what it claims to be. I will show you how they scam you and what you can do to prevent being ripped off.
This reminds me of the SD card scams where it read as a much bigger capacity than it actually was. The trick was the card was overwriting previous data in a loop when you put files on it.
I bought a power bank not too long ago for a reasonable price because I mainly wanted to harvest 18650 batteries for some projects I planned (buying them individually somehow doesn’t exist in my country). I opened it just to discover there was only 1 functional battery while the 5 others were filled with sand. I was so pissed I couldn’t even return it as I already opened it.
If you got it online from one of the larger retailers, like Amazon or eBay, you should ask for your money back on the basis that you had been the victim of a scam. It's immaterial that you opened it, if in doing so, you discovered that you had been scammed. Take pictures and explain the situation to them. Smaller retailers can be more of a struggle, though you may be able to appeal to a payment processor such as PayPal for redress. It all depends on how much you paid for it. I generally let cheap stuff go, but I'm like a dog with a bone when it comes to more expensive items that either don't work, or where there is deception. Physical shops can be more intractable, unless you're willing to pursue legal action.
Thanks for the video! Lots of people are having trouble with the run time of their go pro camera batteries. I'm interested to see some of your ideas on how to extend the life of these batteries. That was unbelievable to see what you found inside yours. Thanks for making us aware of what's really going on (or not) inside there.
i got scam once buying powerbank, its rated as 20.000mah after charging it to full i used to charge my phone(5000mah) once to full after that its reading zero %, i open the powerbank and its the same configuration as your video, have 2 plates of steel as weight and 2 battery pack 3000mah so the total only 6000mah
Thankyou for this video and your others, you're entertaining... But.....(!) : Aluminum, copper, brass, titanium, tungsten, and lead are not ferromagnetic (neither are gold and silver but they wont scam with gold weights!). This magnet test is almost certainly less reliable than weighing the pack. (particularly considering how common these non-magnetic metals are in scrap, and lead being the metal that *literal* weights are most commonly made from!) The best approach (and the only approach I'd bother with) is probably measuring the time from fully charged to dead while powering a known load. Testing the watt-hours a fully charged battery can put out won't tell us lots of important info (their max safe current output; how quickly they'll wear; their circuit component quality (bad electronics lead to unbalanced, barely chargeable batteries, to house fires!) etc). Fortunately, that rarely matters: the cells are by far the most expensive component in a battery pack, so in practice it's rare for a scammer to try to shave off money anywhere else, and if the battery's capacity is ok, the rest likely are.
(Extra note - no 18650 will ever produce its advertised capacity. The makers of 18650 cells exaggerate this *so* much, it's become ridiculous! I've actually got a refund from a seller that falsely advertised a capacity over 20x more than the battery had after doing a discharge test, but that was years ago, and I expect you wouldn't get a refund today now that all the producers lie about capacity!)
