A little over a year ago, we reviewed Friendly Farms live sauce carts. We found them to be excellent, the cart that hits like you’re truly dabbing. Well, here comes the bad news as it so often does in this industry: counterfeit Friendly Farms carts have hit the streets!
Counterfeit Friendly Farms spotted on black market sites
Spotted them on DHGate recently, when looking to refresh our top ten fake carts list:
Vapes Wholesale follows suit:
As always, the appearance of empty packaging being sold on third-party Chinese sites means that street vendors will be grabbing the packaging to fill with whatever bunk ingredients and selling to gullible vapers. You dear readers of our site are not gullible vapers, are you?
Friendly Farms collaborations, past and present
Friendly Farms lives up to their name, collaborating with other brands occasionally. This does, unfortunately, make it confusing for people trying to tell real from counterfeit. Here’s the current scorecard:
- Connected Cannabis Co.
- Alien Labs – not to be confused with the, like, dozen other “alien” cart brands out there, real and fake
- Sherbinski – Already heavily counterfeited, as we reported back there. This is particularly troublesome, because one Sherbinski cart looks exactly like another thanks to their square traffic cone design motif.
There is also a previous collaboration between Friendly Farms and Higher Vibrations, which is a saga of its own. Early on this year, we were alerted to Higher Vibrations going on using Friendly Farms’ name on their packaging long after the collaboration had concluded. HV was simply filling with their own oil but still using the boxes printed from FF. HV has since gotten over its affair with FF, changed its status back to ‘single,’ and moved on, but counterfeits of carts from that pairing still appear, we hear.
Fake Friendly Farms spotted in the Reddit wild
Starting from this thread reporting a Virginia plug offering Friendly Farms carts, Friendly Farms’ own Reddit account responds to affirm that fakes are out there.
In fact, Friendly Farms is quite active on Reddit and is happy to answer any questions. If only all cannabis product companies cared as much about P.R.! Friendly Farms’ account posts informative tidbits like these:
So you have it from the source: Any Friendly Farms cart containing distillate is fake! The company has also changed its packaging recently “to keep the counterfeiters on their toes.” So here is an updated FF package:
Of course, you can find current versions of all their products on the official Friendly Farms site.
Friendly Farms brand owner weighs in : spotting fake carts
We reached out to the owner of the Friendly Farms brand, and he shared with us the following informative comments on spotting fakes:
Here are a few variations of knock offs that we have come across:
Boxes:
Large friendly farms name on box is glossy on the fakes, real boxes are matte finished and soft touch.
They almost always mess up the dating and batch ID. Our batch ID is based on the date the oil was manufactured (LL-00010419-A) this would be liquid live (LL), manufactured on Jan 4,2019 (010419), first batch made that day (A).
Our products are good for 2 years, most of the knockoffs shows as expiring 1 year after package date.
We have fully updated our boxes so the knockoffs should be apparent now, until they make the new version.
Our newer cured resin comes in a black box.
Another tell tale sign is if our old logo is present anywhere, unless you buy it at a licensed retailer the old logo in gone. Very few remaining on the legal market.
Carts:
There are several variations, but they are easy to spot. All authentic friendly farms carts now available on the legal market have our name and font printed bottom to top vertically. The knockoffs have tried to match this but they always get the font wrong, if it doesn’t match our IG font it ain’t real.
Some of the available versions on DHGate are etched on the metal rather than printed on the glass. We stopped etching nearly a year ago, so there are no more of these on the legal market.
Again look for variations in the font as we use a very particular one.
They have also been found with mistakes on the spelling, there is a large batch of “friencly farms” going around.
The sellers are saying it was an error that we released for a discount, but if there was ever a mistake like that we wouldn’t release them…also the font is wrong.
Any cartridge with our old logo (or anything for that matter) on the mouthpiece is fake as we stopped using those about 5 months ago.
Oil:
Our oil is ALWAYS full spectrum oil. This means that at its best it will be a rich yellow color and at times will appear darker amber.
Our oil will never really look like distillate. Most of the knockoffs we have come across are obviously distillate and they rarely contain actual live or cured resin. If it’s clear or a faint yellow, it’s definitely fake. Our oil is always rich in color due to the full spectrum of compounds present in our oil.
Stickers:
Our tamper evident sticker should say friendly farms, if it is our old logo then it’s a fake. Also, we apply the tamper evident horizontally across the bottom, some knockoffs we have seen place the sticker vertically.
Child resistant:
Sometimes the knockoffs will come without a child resistant tube. In California these are a requirement. If you see a cart in a box without a CR tube, it’s a fake for sure.
So that’s a complete rundown straight from the brand!
Readers, are you spotting Friendly Farms carts from street plugs?
Help us in our continued efforts to stay two steps ahead of the black market! Report your findings here in the comments or in our forum.
I got a few boxes with spaces missing between a few words. I’m scared I got fakes. Help
Wish I saw this 24 hours ago. Also had a bad experience with Spliff Nation where they gave me a faulty cart and then swapped it for what seems to be a counterfeit cart. SMH.
Just had a terrible experience with Spliff Nation in Washington DC. Customer service online was fantastic, until the order took an hour and then another 45 to actually speak to the tender. I was offered an edible or cart to compensate for trouble – I hadn’t really complained, just wanted a timeline. Anyway, the tender insisted on coming to me, and there was the cart. I came home to research it and got super excited – but this article proves it’s a fake.
I just bought an alien cart and got a connected cart in the box. Labeled atomic apple but taste like creme de menthe.
Herman, who said that most counterfeits are the same quality as the “legitimate“ ones, when it comes to his knowledge on the topic, is showing tremendously DANGEROUS ignorance, as all I can say to you is, just touching the box from a fake cartridge from another brand, my tongue and throat started to swell, broke out in hives, BP went through the roof, as well as many other negative symptoms, from chemicals that actually were absorbed through my skin, having never used the product, and when did a little research found out that in fact it was counterfeit, as well as many counterfeit cartridges were found to have dangerous chemicals I like formaldehyde, heavy metals, etc. in them, and that goes the same with every counterfeited brand! If it’s not a legitimate, batch tested cartridge, you are literally risking your life, as many have been found to be tainted with the carcinogenic chemical used in “Roundup“ weed killer I believe it is, in other words, their poison cartridges, not THC cartridges!
Found 50 in a storage unit neatly packaged everything look legit all the way down to the matte finish on the box
I’m pretty sure I was given a fake. I can send pictures to you guys 🤦♂️ feeling real good that I read this thread
I bought fake cartridges from 2 delivery services in the Bay Area. One was “Flavas 24/7” and the other was “Mitch’s Boutique”. I didn’t get a refund from either place.
I just got one. Everything is legit and except for the batch id and the expiration date. Otherwise it’s spot on from the real one. I just got these ones in Minnesota.
Same as mine
Hi can you tell me where I can order these
I’m using your product now. And I couldn’t be more pleased. Very good quality. Many thanks 😘
We’re glad you’re happy with whatever you have, but we sell no products here.
i have real one right now and my plug had 3 thousand if them at his house
that man who said the the fakes are good if not better is retarded
Most counterfeits are the sane quality as the “legitimate” ones, but the author doesn’t mention that. This website and the people who write articles for it are corporate tools, be a god citizen and buy your gear from your neighbor. Chances are it’ll be better and cheaper
Not at all because the hardware quality is not the same. Even if you use the same oil, the fake CCELL or other type of hardware has not been subject to heavy metals testing like something from CCELL/iKrusher/Ispire/BBTank etc.
If the plugs really cared and just wanted to sell good oil, they would just buy quality hardware and fill it. There are some black market brands out there that get what type of tests they can (R&D) and they do pass and people like the product. They also use good hardware. For example, Left Coast Extracts was unregistered for a while (as of 2019 September is a 100% legit brand), but even when they were not registered they still used high end hardware that passes the appropriate tests.
These fake friendly farms carts may or may not pass the hardware tests for heavy metals, we do not know.
And for us being a corporate shill, believe what you want. Check out our best lists for THC carts for California and Nevada. You will see that a lot of the top picks are from companies that don’t even advertise and aren’t even big corporate companies, while we got no problem telling people a product is crap. We do not even do sponsored posts.
If we were corporate shills we wouldn’t tell you that Stiiizy’s current California distillate is weak or that Chemistry which doesn’t even advertise would be our top cart choice for CA. If we were a pay to play site we would be telling people crap carts are gold, just like all the promo out there for Brass Knuckles was out there, which we also said was not good as of now.
But if it’s a “corporate” product and it’s still good, we’ll still say it’s good. MPX Live Resin is an example of that. Also often we’re retesting products after they have changed to see if they are better and we update the review to reflect that.