Recently bought two refurbished LG G6 H873 from Aliexpress for CAD$130. Both of them are defective and I can't return them because I updated the ROM trying to fix the problem myself. Although I just updated to a later version of official ROM without rooting, the seller denied my request for return and refund
Below is the brief recount of my unfortunate experience:
- Placed an order for a H873 to a seller. The seller did not respond for a week.
- After waiting for a week, I cancelled the first order and placed second order to another seller review says responds quickly. Yes, the seller responded in a few hours and within 24 hours the phone is shipped.
- The first seller responded that my cancellation of first order is rejected because the phone has been shipped, although online status did not show.
- So I waited for the two phones thinking I could use them both or sell one of them on Kijiji.
- The second phone arrived in two weeks. Quick delivery.
- I found I can't make and receive calls on Freedom Mobile. After a lot of testing, I determined the 3G Band 4 AWS/1700 is dead on this phone.
- Attempted to fix the issue through resetting and updating to the latest official ROM. All failed.
- Contacted the second seller for return and refund. The seller's response is:
"upgrading the system by yourself or auto updating is not supported since we have tested the phone carefully and upgraded the system to the most stable stytem before shipment.and we will not be responsible for such case."
So essentially even automatic official update is not supported and void warranty. - The first phone came. It works with voice calls, but its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is dead. After a lot of attempts to fix it myself, including updating to the latest official ROM, I came to realize it is a hardware defect, caused by bad contacts of wifi/bluetooth ic on the motherboard.
- Also contacted the first seller for return and refund. The seller offered a 20% refund. This is better than the second seller, because it is better than nothing, so I accepted the offer. Then I cracked open the phone to fix it myself following above mentioned instructions. Voila! The phone is clearly assembled out of used parts, and most importantly, there NO wifi/bluetooth chip on the motherboard!
Lesson learned.
Update:
I was wrong about the second phone that I thought had bad 3G Band 4. Last week I updated it to official ROM Android 9. Everything starts to work. Incoming and outgoing voice calls work well. Also Android 9 works noticeably faster than Android 8. So the takeaway from this incident is still, be careful when buying phones from Aliexpress.
Update:
I was wrong about the second phone that I thought had bad 3G Band 4. Last week I updated it to official ROM Android 9. Everything starts to work. Incoming and outgoing voice calls work well. Also Android 9 works noticeably faster than Android 8. So the takeaway from this incident is still, be careful when buying phones from Aliexpress.
