Spot the difference: the invincible business of counterfeit goods

I can see why people fake things such as those. If there are fashion-conscious idiots who are prepared to pay thousands of pounds for a handbag or pair of shoes, just because of the brand label then why not have a go - "A fool and their money..." and all that.

What I find more interesting and more puzzling --and what was not covered in the article-- are the economics behind counterfeit electrical goods.

Anyone with a sewing machine can knock up a fake designer handbag. But it actually takes a fair amount of logistics, equipment and expertise to knock out fake electrical goods. And I would have thought that, with the relatively small production runs, there wouldn't be that much profit --especially considering the upfront investment [in time and equipment].

ANECDATA: Back in the day, a guy I used to work with bought an iPhone 4 off eBay, not long after it was launched. He brought it to me [as the resident 'techy person'] and asked me to look at it, as it wasn't syncing with iTunes properly.

I plugged it into my laptop and it mounted on the desktop as a removable storage [which an iPhone wouldn't have done] and, investigating further, I found it contained a Linux distro of some sort, obviously skinned to look like iOS and with fake versions of all the usual Apple apps.

Looking at the hardware itself, the casing seemed to pretty well mimic a genuine iPhone. the only difference I could spot was that in the small print engraved on the back, it said 'Designed in America' rather than 'Designed in California', which I took to be an indication that the intended market was somewhere 'foreign' enough that whoever made it worried that their intended audience might not realise California is part of America.

Anyway, I remarked to my mate at the time that I was amazed that someone had gone to so much trouble to create a fake copy of something which only sold for a few hundred pounds anyway. Even allowing for a presumed origin in a place like China with rock-bottom manufacturing costs.

In the end, my mate decided to keep the fake iPhone [though not to use as his daily driver] as he thought it was probably a more interesting artefact than a real one.

Methinks those French museum folks would agree.