Facepalm: Huawei has been busted once again, this time for fabricating images supposedly shot by their upcoming P30 Pro smartphone. The images weren't actually taken by the device, but were instead stock photos taken by a DSLR camera. While the Chinese phone manufacturer has made headlines recently for its data practices, they have a long and colorful history of faking images and benchmarks for marketing purposes.

Another hiccup has been confirmed for the enemy-of-the-state and potential Chinese spy mobile phone maker, Huawei. The company recently published image samples along with their teaser of the upcoming P30 Pro smartphone with its periscope zoom lens. Some detective work at GSM Arena uncovered that the images Huawei claimed were taken by the P30 were actually stock photos taken with a DSLR camera.

The suspected fakes were published on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, with the campaign strongly suggesting that the photos were taken by the P30's camera. Huawei initially reacted to the discovery with a statement:

"We would like to reiterate that those are, in fact, only teaser posters, and are only intended to hint at the unique new features that will come with the Huawei P30 series," the company said. "Huawei has acquired the licenses to the original images and the posters are artistic renditions of said features only. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank the media for their interest in our posters."

Earlier today, however, the company acknowledged that there may have been a "misunderstanding" regarding the published images.

Huawei has a habit of faking things for marketing purposes. Back in 2015, they (poorly) photoshopped bezels out of the P8 and P8 Max to make the phone look sleeker than it actually was. Last year, they were busted shamelessly faking images, again from a DSLR camera, to promote the Nova 3. Earlier in 2018 they asked people to write fake Mate 10 Pro reviews for a chance to become beta testers. Oh, and let's not forget them inflating benchmark data to make the Honor Play seem more powerful than it actually is.

You won't be able to buy it in the US, but the Huawei P30 looks like a pretty impressive device on its own, even without the fabricated marketing campaigns.