Samsung is promoting its Galaxy A8 (2018) smartphone in Brazil and it recently tweeted out some images supposedly taken from the device’s selfie camera. However, a keen observant on Twitter, @felipras, caught that the posted images were not taken using the Samsung phone and are actually stock photos from Getty Images that were originally posted on the stock photo agency’s website back in 2015. The user posted the original image as a reply to Samsung Brazil’s original tweet saying (translated directly from Portugese), “Want to fool who, @ SamsungBrasil.” As a response the company again tried to pass the images as photos taken using its smartphone by replying, “This is ours, isn't it nice?”
The Twitter user then took it upon himself to dig into other photos posted by Samsung Brasil and find the original images along with their prices. When the user again posted the original images from Getty as a reply to the company’s tweets of images that were supposedly captured using the Galaxy A8 (2018), Samsung realised that its lie has been caught and responded saying, “Oops, sorry, you're right, Feliperas. The answer given before was not really correct. Many of the photos we post are taken using our smartphones, but some, like that, are images that also express the attitude of our target audience.” The company later deleted the tweets.
https://twitter.com/feliperas/status/1030113594413854720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
This is not the first time a company has intentionally or unintentionally tried to mislead its customers. Back in 2012, when Nokia was a part of Microsoft, the company demonstrated the effectiveness of OIS on the Nokia 920. In a video, we saw a couple riding bikes and the guy is recording a video. The promotion was almost flawless and the video was astonishingly stable for being captured from a mobile phone back in 2012, until in a reflective surface we clearly get to see that it is actually being shot using a professional grade camera from a white van with a complete camera crew. Nokia later apologised for the fiasco and posted another video, which it said was captured using the phone, however, the damage was already done. You can read about this in detail here.