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Chinese counterfeits
This is not specifically a gun subject but I found it interesting.
I was reading a thread on some purportedly Zeiss optics for sale on Ebay that were in fact counterfeits from China. The thread went on with several responses ranging from critiques of Ebay or folks naming reliable sources for Zeiss to just rants about the collective ethics of the whole country of China.Depending on where you are on that spectrum, you may find this interesting.
There is a podcast called “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe” put out weekly by some noted skeptics. One of the members of the podcast recounted a scam that was going around in china when she visited some fellow skeptics in 2014 or 2015. The funny part was that the scam was targeted at other potential scammers and went like this.
The scammer offers instructions and perhaps a kit that lets a potential scammer manufacture “counterfeit chicken eggs”. Supposedly this kit would allow a potential scammer to make these fake eggs indistinguishable from real eggs, but with less or no nutritional value. The idea was if you made enough of them and mixed them in packages with real eggs, no one would be able to casually spot the difference and you could produce these fakes for something like 30-50% less than it costs to raise and harvest real eggs.There are no good numbers on how many would-be scammers fell for this, but the rumor of fake eggs has been so well circulated that consumers have become suspicious of real eggs and carefully examine them or claim to have found fakes mixed with their real eggs. There are a bunch of websites claiming to help consumers identify these fakes. Needless to say, there is no conceivable way to manufacture a believable fake egg cheaper than a real one and no reliable evidence has been produced that the fakes exist.
So it turns out that we in the west aren't the only ones getting burned by counterfeit shenanigans, and at least this time its mostly the scammers getting scammed lol.
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