"After 7 years I discovered my Pokémon Emerald cartridge is a fake"

I have owned a cartridge of Pokémon Emerald for about 7 years which I bought off of eBay, unaware of the existence of fakes (back then anyway, I did hear of fakes eventually but never bothered to check mine). For those 7 years, I have played and replayed the game having it randomly corrupt after beating the elite 4 and brushing it off as a glitch. Recently I decided to pick it back up again (knowing that it would most likely reset after I finished it as usual) and just beat the 6th gym and decided to research the whole “resetting after elite four” just to see if there’s someway I could stop it. I have now found out that the “save file will be loaded” message I have seen for years and passed as normal is a big red flag. Additionally the back of the cartridge has 004 which is apparently another red flag. I was hoping that the whole reset after elite 4 was random and could be fixed, but now I feel defeated realising I’ve been playing a fake for 7 years with no chance of making it through to the post game. I guess the lesson to take away here is make sure you do your research before mindlessly buying off eBay.TL;DR Bought Pokémon Emerald off eBay 7 years ago, only just found out it’s fake, passed several red flags off as normal, don’t be like me and buy without doing research.EDIT: https://ift.tt/2yVGfEw It’s as I feared, produced February 2010. I also now realise the actual Emerald sticker itself is not even what it’s supposed to look like. So this fake is pretty much as fake as it gets.EDIT2: Unfortunately my save file has been corrupted. I refused to give in to being scammed so I attempted to back up my save file using the R4 GBA dumper. But as I deduced previously, if any NDS cartridge attempts to interact with Emerald (like a Gen 4 game trying to migrate) it corrupts itself. Idk if that was the manufacturers own defence mechanism or just really shoddy creation, but it’s gone. I’m not too sad about it, I went into playing the game again knowing it could randomly corrupt. via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/2KALgUA