Many moons ago I worked at an apple store genius bar, and this was constant. There wasn't a whole lot we could do about it unless the phones were obvious fakes. Those we would reject, as well as ones where the serial number came up as having been replaced a number of times.
Guys would bring in a bunch of phones at a time. They knew the apple store drill and would make a separate appointment for each phone. It sucked, and took time and resources away from real customers. But we couldn't broom them without a concrete reason so they usually got at least a couple phones replaced.
We mostly assumed the phones were stolen and were being washed for new serial numbers, but it makes perfect sense that there are big counterfeiting operations behind this.
I think I just realized what kind of people I sold my authentic MacBook Air case bottoms to. And case from a broken iPhone.
Edit: side note: it took a while to sell for not a lot of money. But other than someone needing to drill out a screw and caring about how it looked afterwards, i couldnt figure out why anyone would buy.
Its battery died. With a student discount and the cost of a new battery, I could (and did) upgrade to a new model by selling all the parts. Even the screws.
Some say the MacBook Air is highly integrated and unrepairable. They are wrong.
Because it has value? If you have something that you don't want and someone else wants to buy it (and there's no obvious fraud involved), it's a trivial decision.
The point was, how do you know it has value if you can't figure out why anyone would buy it?
I was genuinely curious. A perfectly fine answer would have been "I try and sell everything, because I don't know if it has value to someone". But failing that, you had to have decided to try it for some reason....
Curious, in what region was your prior experience with this scam?
Because I'd heard this was rampant and sophisticated in China – with fraudsters being very advanced in their ability to make "junk inside" devices indistinguishable from authentic broken devices, via any cursory/external analysis. But, until this story, I hadn't heard of it at scale in the US. (And here, as well, it seems the high-quality fakes are coming from China.)
At least it was the consumer ripping off the corporation for once. Think of the chicklet keyboards, or the proprietary, consumer-hostile tactics that stole millions from consumers (or the billions in taxes that apple refuses to pay). It's nice to see the tide turn occasionally.
Guys would bring in a bunch of phones at a time. They knew the apple store drill and would make a separate appointment for each phone. It sucked, and took time and resources away from real customers. But we couldn't broom them without a concrete reason so they usually got at least a couple phones replaced.
We mostly assumed the phones were stolen and were being washed for new serial numbers, but it makes perfect sense that there are big counterfeiting operations behind this.