I've recently been annoyed by "UK sellers" that actually ship from China, but using Yodel's "last mile" logistics[1]. They'll give you the tracking code for the Yodel part of the journey, and it'll take a week longer than the originally advertised, but they'll swear they shipped from the UK.
[1] https://www.yodel.co.uk/yodel-services/yodel-uk-delivery/int...
It was not littlediode this time, I'm not going to name them (you'll be able to tell with a search as the chip has the same date code on their auction). There are several out there that buy from China and resell. The good ones at least run a barrage of tests first.
Oooooh them. They always looked suspicious.
They were very unhappy with the negative I left. To be fair, I have had other things from them in the past that do appear to be the real deal.
There are a couple of vendors who do this in the UK. They sell counterfeit crap while complaining about it loudly. I bet this was littlediode. Got into a large argument with them over sending out crappy clone / reject bin transistors a few years back.
Edit: at the same time I would like to buy a hell of a lot of 2N5458's and relabel them as MPF102's and retire. The MPF102 was an unbinned garbage JFET with wide characteristic spread. The 5458 is a binned one within the range of an MPF102. Same process. Of course though all the crap schematics out there on the Internet demand the MPF102 because that's what Radio Shack sold and no one knows how to substitute parts!