Safety Tip: Avoid Cheap Chinese Knock-Off Gun Safes That Could Get Someone Killed

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Chinese Vehipa handgun safe
Courtesy Amazon

By Dave Goetzinger

I recently examined a plastic toy that’s being marketed as a handgun safe on Amazon. The thing weighs about three pounds, is designed to resemble the much better Vaultek VT20i, and it’s made of the same plastic LEGOs are.

It’s being sold under the brand name Vehipa, though the actual manufacturer of these things is Guangzhou Tsunami Industrial Equipment Co., Ltd., in China. This toy is a #1 Amazon New Release.

Vehipa Mini IOT handgun safe
Courtesy Dave Goetzinger

How bad is this thing? As I said, it’s made of ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), the same thing LEGOs are made of. This plastic offers no resistance to common solvents, including the solvents used in gun-cleaning products.

Believe it or not, you could open the Vehipa handgun safe by pouring nail-polish remover all over the lock.

Vehipa Mini IOT handgun safe
Courtesy Dave Goetzinger

But that’s not the worst of it. You can also pop it open by bumping it against your knee.

Vehipa Mini IOT handgun safe
Courtesy Dave Goetzinger

See the video below to see how easy it is to open this thing.

My prediction: Someone is going to get killed because of this gadget. Some kid will be horsing around one day and bump daddy’s or mommy’s handgun safe off the night stand. It will hit the floor, fly open, and there will be few moments of excitement as the kid plays with the forbidden object. Then a finger will slip inside the trigger guard.

To say that I was horrified by my findings is an understatement. I’m insulted as a gun owner that Amazon continues to allow these irresponsible Chinese manufacturers to put American gun owners at risk. I posted a video about the device on Handgun Safe Research. Then I contacted the manufacturer in China to show them how dangerous their product was. Then I wrote a review for Amazon.

How were my concerns received? Tsunami Industrial wrote this:

“You are only one to get the box with problems until now.” (grammar unaltered)

Amazon offered the following as justification for prohibiting my review from being posted:

“Thank you for submitting a customer review on Amazon. After carefully reviewing your submission, your review could not be posted to the website.”

They suggested that I review their guidelines, which I did and found nothing that would prohibit my review from being posted.

To understand how these contraptions get on the market, consider that nobody involved in the manufacture of Chinese-made handgun safes — not company owners, industrial designers, production managers, or workers on assembly lines — not one of these people has ever handled a gun.

There is no private gun ownership in China. They have no idea what it means to live in compliance with gun laws, and don’t precisely know how the products they make are used. See the image below, pulled from the Alibaba listing for Yiwu Ospon Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. Trading Company, China.

alibaba handgun safe
Courtesy Alibaba

When one of these companies cobbles together something to be sold as a handgun safe, they’re only guessing as to its possible use. Designs are based on the kinds of features that seem to be selling on Amazon. Thus, the Vehipa handgun safe isn’t actually designed to serve a specific function. It’s a collection of features.

The reality is that Chinese industrial designers shouldn’t be designing gun-safety products for use in the United States. That kind of work should be done by people who are knowledgeable about US gun laws and basic gun safety. And if a company wants any meaningful quality control, that’s going to have to be done in the US as well.

As for Amazon, the company should have a system in place by now to properly evaluate product reviews. All anyone had to do was watch my video to see how inappropriate the Vehipa Mini IOT is for purposes of gun safety. Yet while Amazon prevents other products from being sold on the platform, like child sex dolls (also made in China), gun safety products don’t seem to rate any concern on their part.

Their silence speaks volumes.

Sure, we’ll sell gun safety products. But we take no responsibility for the junk being peddled on our site. We don’t give a rat’s ass whether any these products are dangerous. And if your kid gets killed because you were duped into buying a dangerous gadget, that’s what you get for owning a gun in the first place.

 

Dave Goetzinger is the publisher of handgunsaferesearch.com.

 

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86 COMMENTS

  1. You really thought the Chinese manufacturer would care anything at all about American (or any other nation’s) consumers’ safety? After deadly drywall and poisonous pet food?

    I’m only a little surprised about Amazon’s response.

    • “After deadly drywall and poisonous pet food?”

      They poisoned their own baby formula a few year’s back. Killed 6 babies :

      ” China’s parents haunted by melamine baby milk scandal still favour foreign brands

      Domestic makers of baby powder rebuild their market share to 44 per cent, all down to Feihe which was not caught up in the 2008 tragedy
      Foreign brands are seen as “way more trustworthy” and this reputation is likely to last for very long time, EIU says”

      https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3051808/foreign-brands-still-dominate-parents-do-not-trust-chinas-home

      Melamine, the same thing that poisoned pet food here…

      • Poisonous pet food and baby formula…that’s why I clash a bit with the hard core libertarians. There has to be a happy medium with regulations. The answer of, “well you just stop buying it if it’s a bad product” doesn’t work when your baby or pet is now dead. It’s also hypocritical that the regulation obsessed democrats are perfectly fine with exporting jobs to countries with little to no regulations.

        • Thank you for stating a truth that many find difficult to acknowledge.

          The only ‘invisible hand‘ of the market is the greed that drives profit over people.

    • I bought something a while back, forget what now, or even whether I liked it or not. The product came with a card inside promising that 5 star reviews would be worth a $15 gift card for more of their products.

      Kinda pissed me off, fishing for good reviews. So I left a 1 star review, included pictures of the come-on, and it was rejected too. Their guidelines to state that reviews are meant for the product only. If I wanted to smear the manufacturer, I had to do with with seller feedback.

      I’ll guess that’s what happened here. It would be really hard to leave an honest review without slamming the manufacturer.

    • it is not that guns kill people
      it is safebox kills people

      stop buying chinese cheap shit
      anything cheaper than 200 dollars is chinkshits
      200 dollar more for american made quality shits
      dont let cheapshit rip you off

      vote trump
      make america great again

      • “China this month awarded Ivanka Trump seven new trademarks across a broad collection of businesses, including books, housewares and cushions.
        At around the same time, President Trump vowed to find a way to prevent a major Chinese telecommunications company from going bust, even though the company has a history of violating American limits on doing business with countries like Iran and North Korea.”

        “The Chinese government granted 18 trademarks to companies linked to President Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump over the last two months, Chinese public records show, raising concerns about conflicts of interest in the White House.
        In October, China’s Trademark Office granted provisional approval for 16 trademarks to Ivanka Trump Marks LLC, bringing to 34 the total number of marks China has greenlighted this year, according to the office’s online database. The new approvals cover Ivanka-branded fashion gear including sunglasses, handbags, shoes and jewelry, as well as beauty services and voting machines.”

        “Factory workers in eastern China have been working hard since March to churn out about 90,000 “Keep America Great” banners for Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, aiming to fulfill the massive order quickly to avoid the potential economic impact of the president’s trade war.”

        “It’s closely related,” Yao Yuanyuan, the manager of Jiahao Flag Co. Ltd., where tens of thousands of Trump campaign banners have been produced in recent months, told Reuters. “They are preparing in advance, they are taking advantage of the fact that the tariffs haven’t gone up yet, with lower prices now.”
        Yao pointed out that the months from spring until summer are typically the low season for production in the Jiahao Flag Co. factories. This year, however, the women operating the facilities sewing machines have been kept extra busy hemming the edges of “Trump 2020” flags, currently selling for about $1 per flag. The campaign team wouldn’t want to avoid such an affordable deal.

        Yao explained that her factory has been producing Trump’s paraphernalia ever since his first campaign, back in 2015. Many of the iconic “Make America Great Again” or “MAGA” banners were produced by Jiahao Flag Co., an irony that is apparently lost on many Trump supporters.“

        Trump / Putin 2020

        “We hate the same people that you do!“

  2. AMZ already doesn’t want to sell gun stuff, let’s mess with them, between browsing child sex dolls.
    Genius!

    • “There are 268 items for sale on the Trump Organization’s online store. Of those, 41 are made in the USA and listed in a separate section highlighting US goods. That means American products make up exactly 15.298507462686567% of the Trump Store’s available merchandise.
      During an April 2017 visit to the Snap-on-Tools headquarters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, president Donald Trump signed his so-called “Buy American and Hire American” executive order for US government agencies.

      “With this action we are sending a powerful signal to the world,” the president announced. “We are going to defend our workers, protect our jobs, and finally put America first.”

      After Nabisco sent some factory jobs from the US to Mexico in 2016, Trump responded by saying he would no longer eat Oreos, a Nabisco product. His own products, according to a 2016 Washington Post investigation, are made in 12 foreign countries: China, Mexico, India, Turkey, Slovenia, Honduras, Germany, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Vietnam, and South Korea.

      News18.com › buzzDonald Trump May Want to Increase China Tariffs, Yet These Trump …

      • Unfortunately, since the manufacturing exodus has happened for close to half a century, very few products are wholly manufactured in the U.S. You want it, you are going to have to buy overseas for the meantime. It will take years of coaxing, economic incentives and consumer education to get any decent amount of manufacturing to come back to the U.S.

        Oreos suck btw.

        • Damn off-brand Hydrox…

          15% sounds about right for the percentage of consumer goods that are actually manufactured in the US these days. If you restricted yourself to US only, you wouldn’t have much to choose from.

        • Ing,

          I went to a home improvement store today to purchase a battery operated reciprocating saw. I wanted to purchase something made in the U.S.A. Or at least something NOT made in China. No such luck. China manufactured all three brands of battery-operated reciprocating saws that were available for sale.

  3. Better summary? Avoid cheap knockoffs.

    A lifetime ago, my kid brother and I went into the woods, horseback, with rifles and shotguns. One of the rifles was a cheap Japanese knockoff. We made fun of it, but took it along, all the same. That cheap Japanese .22 rifle very nearly killed the kid brother, scaring us witless. First, it fired when it bumped a tree. We figured, “Alright, the safety is crap, we’ll unload it.” Later, reload it, brother fires it, and the bolt comes out, leaving kid brother with a burn mark across his face. Again, it scared us witless. Rather than wait for the third scare, which might have been fatal, we disassembled it, then torched it when we got home. Oxy-acetylene can cure a lot of ills.

    Cheap is cheap, whether Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or even American.

    • The problem is, at $130 it isn’t even inexpensive. One of the most expensive “cheap” things I’ve seen in a while.

  4. Meh. When I bought handguns in the CSSR, the shop threw in (probably Chinese) cable-locks I could’ve cut with a good pair of scissors. Do I wish they’d invested [money that ultimately came from me] in “quality”? Absolutely not.

    The market should always offer variety, especially for products a free customer wouldn’t choose to buy in the first place. As long as the public sector churns out unconstitutional regulatory administrivia, I for one will be grateful to the private sector (in any country) for churning out the cheapest, easiest ways to check the box.

    • safes actually have a fair quotient of Made in USA. V-line will not break the piggy bank, and they have Simplex locks.

  5. Probably the same company that made the POS “UV light” phone sanitizer I bought and promptly returned. All it was was a plastic box with a couple of purple LEDs in it. Complete garbage.

  6. The lockpicking lawyer on youtube, mentioned above, has a whole series on gun safes and gun locks that can be defeated in seconds.

    • The lockpicking lawyer. Man, his delivery is just… bizzare…

      (Can it possibly get any better? The Ammo Fairy left me a prezzie on the front porch, and the Gun Fairy left me a new gun at my FFL!!! Yay for the Gun Fairy! Yay for the Ammo Fairy!!! 🙂 )

  7. When my son was small Mom was shopping for common household supplies at Wal-Mart or Dollar General. John was with her and she bought him a small toy of some sort. It didn’t last an hour when he started playing with it. Dad told him, “It was made in China.” For years after that anytime anything broke he would say, “It was probably made in China.” From the mouths of babes.

    • My dad got me a He-Man figure. You could twist the torso so the figure would snap back like it was throwing a punch. I ended up breaking it and showed my dad. He was pissed, and wrote the company a letter. They actually mailed us a new figure. I never had the heart to tell him that I just sat there and kept twisting it until it broke. Kids, amirite?

  8. Isn’t the free market wonderful!

    Don’t worry about safety regulations, the ‘invisible hand’ will make sure that every product offered to the American public is as safe as it can be, this gun safe at hand is a perfect example!

    The invisible hand has decided that this product is so wonderful, it’s number one on Amazon so it must be a really safe gun safe.

    It’s great to see a feel-good story like this, showing how the free market provides safe products to the American public without the need for pesky job-killing government regulations.

    Huzzah!

    Hey, want to buy some Chinese drywall, got a really good deal!

    • Yeah it’s almost like tariffs, border protection, bringing American manufacturing home, and not dealing with communist China would help make America great again.

      We appreciate your support of Trump 2020.

      • “not dealing with Communist China will make America great again“

        Well so much for that…

        “Ivanka’s company outsources the manufacturing of its clothes to factories in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and China, The Washington Post reported last year.

        Because the president’s new Chinese tariffs don’t name clothing or shoes, the price of Ivanka’s Chinese-made goods won’t increase due to the steep taxes placed on hundreds of other products. Items such as nuclear reactors, aircraft parts, and agricultural tools will be much more expensive to import from China, however. China’s ministry of commerce said in a statement that the tariffs constitute “trade bullying” that “seriously jeopardizes the global industrial chain.”

        There must be different rules for Senior Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump…

        The hypocrisy has reached new levels, hilarious!

        • It doesn’t look to me like a person can buy any clothing at all made in the US. I’m sure there must be something somewhere.

          Will that change? Who knows? I pretty sure that it will never change as long as Dems have anything to say about it.

        • “I pretty sure that it will never change as long as Dems have anything to say about it.”

          I think it’s obvious that that situation won’t change until the trumps are no longer making money from the virtual slave labor in the Third World countries.

          And there are many clothing-makers still in the US, their products cost a little more because they must pay a decent wage and usually can’t employee underage workers for low wages in unsafe conditions.

          But if all you care about is a cheap price, help yourself to Ivanka’s new line of fashionwear, manufactured in the finest sweatshops in China.

          Tell me, do you think it’s ethical for the Senior Advisor to the President of the United States to be negotiating commercial trademark deals with China at the same time her father is negotiating trade tariffs with their government?

        • Interesting way of thinking on all this

          Where is your outrage with Apple’s iPhone? or Levi’s? or Nike?

          There are certainly more egregious offenders. I don’t think you have issues with ethics at all. I think you take issue with the fact that it’s Trump.

        • “ Where is your outrage with Apple’s iPhone? or Levi’s? or Nike?“

          But they aren’t crowing about “Buy American!”, while cutting commercial deals with the Chinese communist party.
          Tim Cook doesn’t hold a position of trust with the American people.

          Again, is it ethical for the Trumps to conduct business with the Chinese while negotiating billion dollar trade deals with their government?

      • You’re being played by Trump the con-man like a fiddle, it’s sad. Biden is certainly not an option but quit dreaming with Trump, all he has to offer are excuses.

    • Labor and environmental regulations are much less overseas compared to the U.S., which is why these products are made there. Sometimes for better or worse. Ultimately it’s on consumers to self educate themselves when buying anything online, especially Amazon, which is why I barely shop there anymore. Too much Chinese garbage products flooding the site.

    • I used to make fun of the notion of an “invisible hand,” but then I did some reading outside the Keynesian orthodoxy, and it turns out that “invisible hand” isn’t magical thinking, it’s a metaphor for the observable truth that there’s more cumulative prosperity and better market efficiency when people are allowed to make their own economic decisions.

      But you keep on rocking with your bad self.

    • Don’t forget the brake pads in imported Chinese cars. They contain asbestos and were given a special exemption to allow import, at least into AUS.

  9. Amazon will delete bad reviews whenever they can and will do nothing to stop fake reviews (i.e. you get sent a coupon or even your money back to leave a 5 star review). I hope someday they are held liable for a faulty product because they deleted reviews over it.

    • “Your comment is awaiting moderation. This is a preview, your comment will be visible after it has been approved.”

      this made me chuckle given the subject

    • I try hard not to use Amazon, but occasionally end up doing so. I had never heard about what you described, but recently ordered two of the same item. Each came with a card describing how to get $25 back-give a 5 star review, take a screen shot of the review, and submit it to a website. The items were $35 each. That’s fvcked up.

  10. Avoid Cheap Chinese Anything,Period.

    These types of thing are nothing more than Leftard security theater to begin with.

  11. Amazon = Jeff Bezos (I’ll forego the “echoes”) a diminutive despot and. propagandist, ‘nuf said.

    • Nah. It’s the paper tiger of pandemics. If the entire Western government/media propaganda complex hadn’t gone all-in on Panic! ™ and “We’re In This Together…Forever…” making it worse while pretending to do something about it, we’d have been back to business months ago and not much worse for wear.

      • What a quaint notion!

        I would be interested in your reasoning to reach the conclusion you state.

        By the way, we’ve reached 170,000 dead Americans, and we’re currently running about 1000 per day.

        Pretty high score for a democratic hoax virus.

        • It’s a serious virus, but that death toll is the number that may have died with, not the number that have died from. In the early days, they didn’t even test. They were told to record it as a Covid death if the symptoms matched. It will be interesting in a couple of years to see if death rates from other causes declined. That would indicative of inflated Covid numbers.

        • I do agree, the Covid numbers are rarely precisely accurate, probably some percentage up or down.

          And I agree, in some cases, the errors are intentional, such as these in Iowa where the Republican administration falsified the numbers to reflect lower cases than reality, placing thousands at risk.

          “A nurse practitioner in Iowa City, Iowa, uncovered a glitch in the state’s coronavirus website that has caused the site to mistakenly report lower numbers of new COVID-19 cases and, by extension, a lower statewide infection rate, resulting in state agencies making decisions based on inaccurate numbers.
          The Associated Press reported Monday that Dana Jones, the nurse practitioner who uncovered the problem, was contacted by the Iowa Department of Public Health in an email confirming the validity of her discovery and noting that the agency is working to fix the problem. The inaccurate data, however, was not reported or announced publicly until Jones spoke with the AP.
          “It’s one of the worst data errors that could be happening right now,” Megan Srinivas, an infectious disease specialist from Fort Dodge, Iowa, told the AP of the uncovered errors. “We are making these policy calls based on completely flawed numbers and that needs to be acknowledged.”

          “IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A state agency says it is working to fix a data error on Iowa’s coronavirus website that lowers the number of new confirmed cases and therefore downplays the severity of the current outbreak, just as schools are deciding whether to reopen.
          The glitch means the Iowa Department of Public Health has inadvertently been reporting fewer new infections and a smaller percentage of daily positive tests than is truly the case, according to Dana Jones, an Iowa City nurse practitioner who uncovered the problem. It’s particularly significant because school districts are relying on state data to determine whether they will offer in-person instruction when school resumes in the coming days and weeks.”

        • At work right now, otherwise I could look up the bookmark and point you right at the articles where economists and statisticians used the very same data you cite to show how devastating this pandemic isn’t, and how illusory all measures against it have been.

        • Also, I called it a paper tiger, not a hoax. Brush up on your metaphors.

          It’s a real pandemic…on its way to becoming endemic as virtually all of them do, and with the human race none the worse for wear, except for all those self-inflicted wounds we were told we *had* to inflict on ourselves or else we’d all die.

      • @ing”..We’re In This Together…Forever…..”

        Soo tired of hearing that…and the “in these unprecedented times” is another one. Hospitals were not overwhelmed similar to Italy in the early days of 2020. The curve was beaten…but now the goal has been moved to face diaper wearing 24/7.

  12. I bought a cheap Chinese made “safe.” It weights 200 lbs, and bolts down securely. It even has a 30 minute fire rating. (Not that I believe it.) It is supposed to hold 16 long guns. Fat chance of that (but the American made are no different on that score.) Will it stop a professional thief? Not likely. Will it stop a meth addict? Probably; it is well enough designed to defeat a pry bar. Will it stop my grandchildren (not that I have any)? Definitely. Most importantly, it complies with the California safe storage requirement, so I don’t have to pay $15 for a useless cable lock every time I buy a new gun.

  13. Two words: Wuhan Virus.
    Why the hell would an American buy something from China now anyway? They obviously don’t care about anyone’s safety or lives.

  14. F – China. They can’t play well with others and are always doing it the dishonest way. I thougjt the Chinese people were a people of great character, easily embarrassed by unethical behavior. It is hard bit I am doing my best to avoid all things out of that country.

  15. Don’t buy anything made in the People’s Republic of China, the products are not only junk, but the P.R.C. government are using money made from foreign trade to upgrade their military for an eventual war against the U.S.A. and the P.R.C.’s neighbors like Taiwan, Japan, and India, among other nations.

    Then is their subversion by buying media companies like Reddit, and buying politicians, funding groups like the Confucius Institute, etc.

    • They’ve almost single handedly made enemies of almost all their neighbors and many other countries. North Korea is an all but vassal state to China and Russia also has issues with the Red Dragon, so may be a co-belligerent.

      From China’s perspective, what is the point of being a superpower if you can’t behave like one?

  16. I remember a friend of mine bought a gun safe that was supposed to hold 24-32 guns. It was a huge monster. He paid extra to have it delivered to his house. When the guys showed up it fell off the hydraulic tailgate. After impact the seam split and it looked like something similar to Sheetrock in between the thin layers of metal.

    • They literally do put sheetrock inside — it’s legit fireproofing when done right. Those fire rated doors with wood skins (you might have one between your kitchen and garage) are full of gypsum for the same reason.

      Although fireproof is a lot like waterproof in that *resistant* is a more truthful term. Your average waterproof item isn’t going to survive a 30 meter dive, and a safe in the middle of a full-on burned-to-ashes house fire isn’t saving your guns, but there’s still some utility in it. Supposedly, my safe is both fireproof and waterproof.

      I hope I never end up testing that. 🙂

    • Glenn Reynold’s is hawking Lenevo computers on Instapundit.

      Glenn: China is asshole
      Helen: Buy from asshole

      As much as I like Instapundit content I think Reynolds is a phony.

  17. You’re all talking trash about China, they would take care of our antifa and BLM problem quicker than that clown in the White House can post a rant on Twitter. They would also handle all the whiny teachers who don’t want to go back to work because of COVID.

  18. “Guangzhou Tsunami Industrial Equipment” Odd that a Chinese company would use a Japanese word (Tsunami) in their name.

  19. We used to have federal laws that required the country of origin to be listed on all imported products – but good luck finding that information anymore. Even in ChinaMart (WalMart) very few products list the country on the exterior. You have to buy it first to find out where it was made – usually somewhere on the poorly written ‘instructions.’ I’ve been trying to avoid Chinese products but it’s not easy since places like Amazon do their best to obfuscate this information.

    I’m rarely the person to say ‘there ought to be a law…,’ but in this case there should be. ALL imported products should have the country of origin listed on the packaging and in the internet age, all online sellers should have it listed in the product description.

  20. I don’t buy from Amazon unless it’s an item I can’t reasonably get locally. I use other sources for product reviews. And, I use the AmazonSmile site if I do make a purchase, because their foundation makes a .5% donation to any of a number of charities that you can select. It appears that their database of charities mimics the list of registered 501(c)(3) organizations. They have a number of gun rights organizations on their list–do a search for Second Amendment Foundation, for example, and see how many options that one brings up. I kinda like the idea of spending some of Bezos’ cash on a charity that he would otherwise sneer at.

  21. Got it, China = crap.
    As for alternatives here’s what i have for pistol lock boxes hidden and bolted down, through my house:
    – Fort Knox $200, simplex lock, reliable, a thief/child would just give up.
    – Sentry Safe $125, biometric/keypad/key, quick easy quiet operator access to gun, thief with a large screw driver can break in, child would give up.
    – Ammo can with padlock hardware and padlock $35, key/combo padlock, thief with a large screw driver can break the hindge, child would give up.

  22. Here’s a safety tip: Avoid Cheap Chinese (redundant) KO’s of anything especially flashlights and anything gun related.

  23. Thank You for this review!!!! I was about to purchase it because it had ALL the features I was looking for – short height, backlit keys, Biometric, Blue Tooth APP, interior light, cable to secure safe in my vehicle….. but was skeptical of the plastic even tough their description states —
    “The safe box is made of military-grade bullet-proof glass plastic, lightweight, but has high strength and toughness, can keep your guns and valuables safely stored in this box.”

    Can NOT believe how tumbler just slid out!!!!

    THANK YOU so very much for taking the time to make the video review.

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