What's worse is potentially using parts that may have once belonged to stolen Apple devices as there was a significant market for them in Shenzhen. Even Scotty/StrangeParts was able to build an iPhone from scratch with parts sourced from there.

That may also be one of the contributing factors to why Apple began enforcing serialized parts in their product lineups but in my opinion, isn't anything new: we have such a system at my workplace that prevents components from being illicitly used or is blocked from being allowed onto a test flow because, this is "what the [big] customer wants".