The story behind the OnePlus 9 Prototype on eBay
A COLUMN of Nils Ahrensmeier 
on January 01, 2021, 14:15 pm | Write a comment | Note: Column - More
Anyone who actively reads our blog will have noticedthat the OnePlus 9 through the blog PhoneArena leaked became. They got the pictures and information from a source that originally wanted to remain anonymous - or not. The story behind it.
Smartphone leaks occur in several places. Either directly in the company, outside the company or in the last place, the dealers. The dealers can ProDon't have the prototype of the OnePlus 9 yet because it's still a bit early. However, since the screenshots in the article linked above were in English, I leaned toward option 2. So they were images of one Prototyp, which have been made outside the company. That's not untypical, since manufacturers like OnePlus send devices to employees around the world to test the smartphones with the cellular networks. Devices are also sent to the cell phone service providers or software companies like Google to adapt their software to devices. In fact, my theory was confirmed, as a little research turned out.
I had first closed with this leak after the PhoneArena article. Such leaks happen all the time and the companies probe based on such articles to determine the "traitor". More or less successfully. But last night I saw a tweet from an editor from XDA-Developers in my timeline, which one Ebay entry linked. The ad showed exactly the OnePlus 9Prototyp, which could be seen in the pictures from PhoneArena. The seller asked for a whopping $3.000 for the device. He wrote in the info text that he would test the device to the end and then do a review.
The ProPrototype of the OnePlus 9 was briefly set to sell for $3000 but revealed the identity of the owner. (Screenshot: TechnikNews)
Greed created karma
From here the disaster for the dear seller really picked up speed. He took pictures of the device and forgot to redact a code in the software. Now OnePlus could easily find out who the Prototyp belonged and where exactly it was located. I also saw right away that an approximate address was stored on Ebay. So I wrote to this person to ask how he could get to the Prototypes and why he wanted to sell them. It turned out that this person Proacquired totypen from the environment mentioned above and at first he did not know that the device was not yet on the market. So he offered to sell the "Story" to PhoneArena, which PhoneArena refused. So he wanted so much Profit on the device as possible. According to the journalistic guidelines, it is not allowed to pay "sources", as this violates the objectivity of both sides and this could usually lead to even more serious consequences for the source (we at TechnikNews follow this baseline and have not yet paid any of our sources with money for their information).
PhoneArena ended up getting the story for free and the article was a hit. The story could have ended well for him here, but he seemed to have been too greedy. He then set himself a trap with the Ebay listing, since he had no idea of the ID number of the Prototyps and they didn't blacken like PhoneArena. So I pointed this out to the seller and he responded relatively quickly, but it was already too late. The pictures quickly went around the world and the original owner of the device is now in massive trouble, as both of them deliberately broke contracts.
And the moral of the story'? Being greedy takes revenge (and rather leave the handling of such information to the people who have a clue about such things)!
