As another commenter said, smells like an urban legend.
Someone will lose money, but it's not going to be the counterfeiter.
There is also a market for recycled and semi-properly labeled chips, for example selling low precision grade analog chips as a higher grade or chips tested for the usual 0-70°C operating temperature range as rated for military/aerospace range -55-125°C.
This is harder to catch with QA. A few years ago there was an investigation in the US where they found some examples of such chips in military equipment and also proved counterfeiting beyond any doubt by ordering military grade parts which have never been offered by the manufacturer in military grade - the vendor simply relabeled them.
And this chip is integrated into your new device. The only way to avoid this, would be a standard start of life vault, that is writeable once with the date and burns of the pathway to to re-write after that.
Oh you mean like every power source is designed today?
There are several engineering reasons to do that, they don't do that to spite people
And it's called capacitor (in the XXI century at least)
I suspect they do it this way rather than manufacture empty packages because there are a huge variety of chips out there with an equally diverse set of package designs. It's easier to pay unskilled laborers to sort chips into 200 different groups based on size, color, and pin count than to build a machine to replicate 200 different package types.
That's the crux. You don't buy mass-produced empty packages to put the parts in. Packaging happens by putting the IC die, pins and bonding wires which connect them together inside a mold and filling it with plastic.
It's probably cheaper and certainly lower-tech to replace markings on existing chip than produce a new one.
It's not clear whether the ones you can buy on eBay or Aliexpress are simply older models (and the manufacturer then removed this coating), or are actually knock-offs. We have no way of really knowing.
It was a good lesson: most of the time it's just not worth it especially if you're not chasing pennies on your product margin.
Not good enough, here's a few more, but there is plenty else out there: http://www.ibtimes.com/why-pentagon-finding-counterfeit-chin...
Ironically SOME sellers on ebay are legit, and some sellers are legit sometimes, so if you play a statistical game buying from ten sellers at a 50th the price of legit on-shore sellers, you still save money. Obviously its a lot simpler to build a temporary test fixture for a 70s linear voltage regulator than a memory chip or obscure CPU support chip, LOL.
When we "recycle" our e-waste, much of it ends up in large landfills in China, where very poor workers melt down old boards, remove chips, and sort them by size and pin count. They then use a machine to scrub off the label and print on a new label of whatever part they want to market (usually obsolete parts that can't be bought from the original manufacturer). These end up in the supply chain of even reputable distributors. Amazingly, some of these counterfeits have made there way into military equipment, and as a result, there's a whole division of Homeland Security that conducts tests on suspect computer chip shipments entering the US.