It has been a long, long, looooong time since we last had a fake cartridge alert. Now that we’ve been vigilant in warning the public for going on a four-year campaign, most of you wised up and stuck to above-the-counter products. The rest, well, there’s a portion of the vape market that just wants to live on the edge. Parents should be aware: Most of these are young kids getting them from plugs at school.
Today’s cartridge is FRYD. Please note: FRYD comes as a disposable oil pen. It’s shaped vaguely like a Stiiizy pod. However, we regard all black market vaping oil products as “carts” just for shorthand. For that matter, quite a few fake vendors we found call them “carts” too.
As my now-standard disclaimer, I can not determine if there was ever a real company making FRYD. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of them on the legit market. There was also no sign of them when I last did a fake cart yearly report. And, while bootleg cartridge fillers have slightly learned not to use vitamin E acetate cutting agents, which caused the initial vaping death epidemic, there are the usual health concerns. For example, one random public tester found trace amounts of nicotine in a FRYD cart sample:
This was likely the result of filling the carts partly with nicotine vape juice to cut the THC oil… assuming there was any to start with. I hope people realize that black market cartridges are not only risky to your health, but they’re always a big rip-off anyway in any case. Here’s another lab test somebody did on a FRYD disposable, and it came back testing safely, but showing it was filled with plain delta 8 oil, not THC “liquid diamonds” as advertised. As if the $20-$40 price for “2 grams of live resin” wasn’t a tip-off enough.
But hang on, we have a full tour.
All FRYD Carts Are Most Likely Fake
This is easy to prove with one quick Google for “FRYD empty” and checking the images tab. Images sample shown above. In strictly mathematical terms, given that the original vendor seems to have zero presence (more on that later) and the empty packaging sites are all over the FRYD brand selling empties for pennies, the vast majority of FRYD carts you encounter anywhere will be fakes. There is no apparent central source.
We see FRYD empties sold on Made-in-China, DHGate, and a new provider in the fake wholesale cart market, VapAcc (presumably standing for “vape access”).
FRYD cartridges are clearly distinguishable by the half-dark-half-light smiley face logo. Everything else about these cartridges screams fake Chinese packaging, from the fruity colors to the ridiculous “strain” names. We do see some variations in package design – the cartridge black market has never been accused of conformity. They typically come in 2-gram oilpens, usually claiming to be live resin.
Speaking of those fruity colors, shout-out to YouTuber InLivingShaka investigating FRYD carts, who also is sick of these watermelon gusher and girl scout cookies vape flavors, even in real carts. For once, I have back-up: InLivingShaka thinks these carts are boof too. Four years ago I was the lone ranting loony about fake carts, but now we have more awareness out there and the vape community has taken to policing its own, hooray!
There Are Dozens of Fake FRYD “Official” Sites
Our second tip-off that there is no real FRYD company is that there are dozens of sites all claiming to be the “real” FRYD. In the top search results, we find:
- frydcarts.com
- frydextracts.store
- frydextracts.com
- frydbars.com – referencing their disposable build
- fryddisposable.com
- frydextracts.shop
- frydextractsdisposable.com
There’s even a “flavorzdisposables.com” we found, which is still selling FRYD disposables anyway. You will remember years ago, Flavorz was another fake brand with no owner. We see this all the time in the boof cartridges game, cross-overs between multiple fake brands. You have to remember, most of the people running these scams online are from outside the US and likely don’t speak a word of English. So to them, they’re cutting and pasting logos that have something to do with a vape product, but the symbols are meaningless.
Naturally, there are dozens of Instagram accounts that all claim to be the “official” FRYD distributor as well. Is there anyone left on Instagram but the fake cart plugs? How about Telegram, do we have Telegram plugs for FRYD?
As surely as the lord made little green apples! Here’s another hint about legit companies: They know the difference between “you’re” and “your” (“If your new, welcome…”). They also don’t refer to their product as “merch dropping.” That’s the talk of somebody filling carts out of their basement.
There’s also a new tool for fake vape cart marketing – ChatGPT!
Yes, the notorious FrankenSPAM engine has been put to use generating reams of boilerplate bot-speak. As you can see, the person/bot team who put this together just went for the top SEO web pages for the keywords, found a lot of speculation about FRYD being real or fake, and then dutifully wrote up a “real or fake” post.
Note: real life humans would never market their product by writing a real-or-fake article. Likewise, real cartridge brands would never publish a real-or-fake article about their own product. A real brand can simply say “here’s our license, look for this product at these locations…” Finally, real-life humans do not write “please remember that I do not have access to real-life data…” That’s ChatGPT’s standard disclaimer; you’re supposed to delete that if you want to fool people into thinking a human wrote it.
The FrankenSPAM nightmare of ChatGPT is a rant I’m saving for another day on another blog. But suffice to say for here, you can tell bot text by the ridiculous way it constructs sentences, and any site with text that doesn’t pass the “human author” test is not to be trusted with your lungs.
Reddit Users Encounter FRYD
In past fake cart write-ups, I have noticed comments that take exception to my “using Reddit for research.” I’ll provide some context: We DabConnection staffies founded and run the /r/fakecartridges subreddit. That’s a whole community self-policing resource where vape fans gather to sort out the fakes. Since there’s no better resource for this – it’s not like the FDA is going to open a dedicated hotline and publish the results – these reports are what we have to go on. So yes, I’m using Reddit examples and you should take them exactly like Reddit examples: Maybe truth, maybe fiction, but definitely evidence that these carts are reaching the street, else why would so many people ask about them?
So there are dozens of these posts cropping up. When there a cartridge brand all over the scene at once without any company behind it, our subreddit gets flooded with people asking about it. One Reddit post even came up just to complain about the number of FRYD posts!
Unlicensed, unregulated brands like FRYD may have anything in them
They could contain heavy metals like lead, pesticides, cut such as Honey Cut, or simply bunk. Or they could be fire if you’re lucky. But a lot of people in the hospital right now weren’t so lucky. Vaping lung injuries continue to hospitalize victims occasionally, even if it’s not a top news story.
Readers, we appreciate any info about where these are found, how they’re circulating, what’s in them, and your experience with them. Sound off here in the comments or in our forums. However, I am NOT going to tolerate anybody claiming FRYD is a real brand. We have had enough street plugs who file for a $35 LLC and then come after us threatening to sue because we said a brand is fake.
