Comment by gwern
7 years ago
We were wondering if this could be used for iPhone scams. It's a dead-simple way to apparently fatally & totally destroy in a deep & non-diagnosable way a pristine iPhone which will however (probably) reverse itself in a few weeks. It seems like this ought to be exploitable somehow. Something like get a new iPhone, helium it, return it for a refund, and somehow hold onto the phone... Couldn't figure out how it would actually work, though.
how about get a phone, accumulate normal life scratches for 9 months, "helium it" hard, so it lasts a while, then get apple to replace it as defective? iiiiiii dunno... there's a scam in there somewhere, were just not being creative enough!
The problem with that is that the helium doesn't do anything special. Just damage/destroy the phone some other way. You're not exploiting its special ability to look completely broken but then magically repair itself in a few weeks.