US gives Chinese smuggler 37 months in the slammer for selling knock-off Apple kit A Chinese citizen will be spending the next three-plus years as an involuntary guest of the US after he was convicted this week of smuggling tens of thousands of counterfeit Apple products into America. Judge Kevin McNulty of the New Jersey US District Court sentenced 44 year-old Jianhua Li to 37 months in prison and one year …
Agreed. Either some (many) thousands of customers bought rubbish knock-offs and could not tell the difference (!) - even though Apple products are supposed to be sold at premium prices - or did not care; or in the words of the Petticoat Lane spiv they all “fell off the back of a lorry” and were in fact the real thing which escaped out of the back door of the factory, or said lorry.
If it was not the real thing but passed muster on QA/QC bases : That is very difficult to achieve. It takes many thousands of man-hours on the part of Apple and its suppliers so - bloody incredible!
But still does not make sense because I thought every iThingy is supposed to call home and verify itself online with Apple before it is activated.
Fundamentally though I am shocked that such a high level of entrepreneurial capitalism should end with incarceration. Hopefully when the team has paid its debt to society they set up legitimately and market under a “This is not an iPhone” blurb. I’d buy one,
most likely they were BUILT BY TH#E SAME PEOPLE working FOR THE SAME COMPANY with THE SAME SUPPLY CHAIN on what is sometimes known as "4th shift", aka the "off the books" shift where they do all of the counterfeiting and cloning - usually for consumption WITHIN CHINA.
Hong Kong in the 80's was ALREADY known as a place where you could buy a camera [for example] and end up wtih a shell that didn't even open the shutter when you pressed the button. Member's Only, Adidas, Canon and Nikon, brands that were often faked at that time and sold in legit-looking stores in town.
"They warned us" about such things when I was there in 1985, as a member of the U.S. Navy. The recommendation was to ONLY purchase things at the China Fleet Club, which was run by the Royal Navy. I got a nice tailored suit and a good quality set of dishes there.
I'm sure that this reputation (for Hong Kong) has continued, and so it seems that Hong Kong was the pipeline for the counterfeit goods in this case. Too bad, I liked Hong Kong when I was there. bamboo scaffolding, construction still going on even though it was 1985, 4 years until the handoff to China.
In any case I have no doubt that the reason these "fakes" didn't look FAKE is that they probably weren't "fake", just NOT paying the royalties...
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