When we checked the executive’s Instagram handle, we couldn’t see the image which he posted. After being criticised for the faking incident, Sung took the image down from his Instagram handle. When we scrolled all the way to posts from April, we found the original image with the Mi Mix 2S watermark.
This is not the first time that a smartphone company has been caught faking camera samples. Last month, Samsung’s Brazilian arm was caught passing stock images from Getty Images as photos taken from the company’s Galaxy A8 (2018) smartphone’s selfie camera. After the expose, Samsung tried to handle the situation but the damage was already done. Just a few days later, Huawei was caught sharing beautifully captured DSLR camera shots as camera samples in an ad for the Nova 3 in Egypt.
The first such infamous case occurred in 2012 when Nokia was a part of Microsoft. The company misled people when it was promoting the effectiveness of OIS on the Nokia 920. In a video, a couple was seen riding bikes and another guy was capturing the video of the couple. The video was too stable for being captured by a mobile phone back in 2012. Further investigation revealed that the ‘flawless’ video was actually being shot using a professional grade camera from a white van with a complete camera crew.