AirPods fakes are extremely, extremely convincing these days. I would be surprised if they were real stolen products from the Apple Store.

If so, these were exceptional fakes, down to the quality of the packaging.

Yup, and you can even buy them for $10-20 off sites like Aliexpress or Temu. They even do the popup for pairing when you open them. The audio quality and ANC is not so great, as far as I know, though.

The counterfeit/replica market for electronics, especially Apple stuff, has gotten really, really good. You often won't be able to easily tell just from the sealed box if it is a fake or not -- though opening usually offers some clues because the counterfeits often don't have the same attention to detail with the opening tab stickers and whatnot. And the stuff that is often hardest to tell, at least with a cursory glance, are AirPods and AirPods Max headphones.

Because I have some friends who don't listen to me and insist on buying things from Facebook Marketplace, I've seen some very convincing looking AirPods Max headphones (you can tell they are fake because of markings inside the ear cups amongst other things, they also usually feel lower quality but that's hard to judge if you aren't familiar with the real things) that will often pair exactly like legit AirPods because the reps have managed to either clone the H1 chip or reverse-engineer the pairing process. The fakes often have real (stolen) serial numbers on the boxes so if you aren't familiar with how Apple does their plastic sealing and just ran a serial number off the box to see if it was legit through the Apple serial number checker, you'd probably think they were legit until you opened them up.

At this point, I would guess that at least 90% of the "sold as new" AirPods and AirPods Max on eBay are fakes.

This is very different from the old-school world of grey-market cameras sold off of street corners in New York that were often legit but were either fenced and/or from foreign markets without official support/warranty.

The rep handbag game has become incredibly good too, to the point that there is now a subculture of people (some who could even afford the legit offerings) who collect and pay real money for the reps that are largely indistinguishable from the real thing -- but that might cost $800 instead of $18,000.

> The rep handbag game has become incredibly good too, to the point that there is now a subculture of people (some who could even afford the legit offerings) who collect and pay real money for the reps that are largely indistinguishable from the real thing -- but that might cost $800 instead of $18,000.

To add another product category, replica watches are almost indistinguishable from real watches these days, Rolex are probably the most widely counterfeit watch brand.

A good replica sub goes for $1,000 while the real watch is around $10,000

Replica watch subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RepTime/

Rolex Submariner Legit vs Replica Video: https://youtu.be/oYY0bI_Aiqc

Yeah...but your average street tout doesn't have a $1,000 replica Rolex on a blanket -- they have a $20 Rolox. Also, those fake bags, watches, etc. don't have packaging. These "AirPods" came with boxes that were basically exactly like the real thing.

Obviously, any New Yorker knows about knockoffs, but these were qualitatively different. They were also prevalent for a week or two, and then seemingly disappeared...as if there was a sudden crackdown or something.

The fake bags definitely have packaging. Fake documents, fake dust covers, fake Hermes boxes. They go all out in some cases. Usually not for the $30 hand bags sold on the street (though you’d be surprised as to the fake documents some of the Louis Vuitton's have inside), but the higher-end reps can be astonishing. A $30 bag masquerading as a $1000+ bag on a street corner isn’t going to have the same accoutrements that a $30 pair of fake AirPods masquerading as a $150 pair will. But a fake $800 bag masquerading as a $18,000 bag will usually come with the goods. Same is true for watches. It’s just the cheapest stuff sold on the street in those categories don’t bother.

The fake AirPods box thing I’ve seen for a long time, again, the tell is usually small differences in font/printing and how they do the pull tabs. The box fit is often different too, but since most of these are presented sealed, people don’t know.

Maybe this really was a ring of fenced goods, who knows. But my guess having seen these things for years is that they were almost certainly a big group of the very common fake AirPods that proliferate eBay and Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and the like and that are probably incredibly popular in foreign markets where the official products are both more expensive and a greater percentage of GDP.

> Apple hasn't authorized the corner blanket guy as a reseller

They are like Apple store geniuses in a more federated architecture.

Are stolen iPhones even usable with cellular networks?