Fake electronics fiascos
Until recently, at least to the best of my awareness and recollection, I’ve only been fooled into three purchases of counterfeit tech devices, all of which I’ve documented in past blog posts:
- Hands-on review: Is a premium digital audio player worth the price? (Specifically note the mention within it of my acquisition of two fake-capacity 400GB microSD cards)
- Memory cards: Specifications and (more) deceptions, and
- USB activation dongles: Counterfeit woes
In the first and third cases, I should, in retrospect, have known better, since the devices I bought were substantially lower priced than equivalents from more “legitimate” seller sources. The second case was the seeming result of someone returning to Amazon a falsely labeled subpar substitute for something they’d bought, and Amazon not catching the switcheroo and reselling it as legit on the “Warehouse” area of their site. In all three cases, happily, I got my money back.
Mercari’s previous track record
This fourth time, unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky. And the deception was, if anything. more impressive (among other, less-positive adjectives) than before. Mercari, for those of you not already familiar with it, is a Japan-based buyer/seller intermediary online service in the same vein as eBay or (for audio gear) Reverb. It’s generally considered to be more “seller-friendly” than eBay; how much so will become clear shortly. My first (recent) purchase there, which went smoothly and successfully, was of a headphone amplifier. I subsequently picked up a matching equalizer from the same manufacturer (Schiit Audio) via another seller, along with two Raspberry Pi AI Cameras and a special-edition Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses set, the latter which will be showcased in another writeup (a pseudo-teardown, to be precise) this month. All went fine.
The sixth Macari-coordinated transaction? Not so fine. Perhaps, in retrospect, the prior track record lulled me into a false sense of complacency. More likely, I just “wanted to believe” too much, referencing the memorable X-Files poster- and character-delivered quote:
I’d been watching the for-sale postings of a seller with username “Skii” (apparently short for “skiitheflipper”) for a while. This person regularly listed claimed-legitimate and factory-sealed 2nd-generation Apple AirPods for sale, and Mercari dutifully let me know each time “Skii” lowered his sales price on the particular set I was watching. When they hit $93, I was seriously tempted. And when Mercari did a one-day free-shipping promotion, I bit. The total price, including sales tax and a $3.54 “buyer protection fee” (cue foreshadow snort), was $100.88.
A pause here for some background: first off, given that I already had both a primary and backup set of first-generation AirPods Pros, why was I interested in a second-generation set the first place, particularly with the AirPods Pro 3 rumored to arrive later this year? At the normal $249 price, I wasn’t. Even at the fairly common $189-or-thereabouts promotion price, I didn’t pull the trigger. But why the interest at all? The AirPods Pro 2, in comparison to the first-generation forebears I already owned, have claimed superior active noise cancellation, for example, along with dynamically adaptive “transparency” mode and longer battery life. More recent gen-2-only enhancements include the Hearing Aid feature, which I don’t require (at least I don’t think so! What did you say?) but still wanted to try. And the further temptation of possibly upcoming Live Language Translation pushed me over the edge…once the price tag dipped below $100, that is.
About that price…many of you are likely right now thinking something along the lines of “Were you really so stupid as to think that something sold at a roughly 2/3 discount to MSRP was legit?”. Actually, I wasn’t. Although, hey, who knows…per the “flipper” portion of the seller’s username, maybe he or she had scooped up the inventory of a going-out-of-business retailer and was reselling it. Regardless, I figured that I’d give the purchase a shot, and if it was a fake (as I assumed would be immediately obvious) I’d file a dispute and get my money back. Which was conceptually feasible, mind you. But as a Mercari newbie, I didn’t realize how difficult it would be, both in an absolute sense and in relative comparison to eBay (on which I’d been a regular participant since 1997), to translate the buyer-refund concept into reality. Hold that thought.
The listing
Back to my story. To his credit, the seller was at least speedy from a delivery standpoint; the package shipped on Tuesday, April 1 (April Fool’s Day: how prophetic) and arrived that same Saturday. At first glance, at least to my uneducated-recipient’s eyes, everything looked authentic, although had I known more/better I never would have clicked on “buy” in the first place. Here are the photos that accompanied the listing:
Looks legit, right? Only one problem, I later learned: Apple reportedly no longer sells AirPods in shrink-wrapped boxes. But pretend for now that, like me at the time, you’re not aware of that critical nuance.
The delivery
Here’s the (shrink-wrap already removed) box of the actual product I received, as usual, accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes:
The tape strips at the top and the bottom were seemingly “stiffer” than I’d remembered before with other Apple devices, but I didn’t give that much thought, eager to get inside:
Getting the two halves of the box apart was similarly more difficult than I’d remembered …but again, I now have the benefit of hindsight in making these key-nitpick observations. The literature package up-top seemed to be legit:
The protective plastic sleeve around the case admittedly also seemed flimsier than I’d remembered from other Apple earbuds (there’s that rear-view-mirror perspective again):
Putting the case aside for a minute, let’s look at the rest of the contents (again, a reminder that these shots were taken post-initial removal). Extra earbud tip sizes:
And below them, an authentic-looking and functional (at least for charging) USB-C cable:
Now for that case. The LED in front seemingly operates as expected (both green and orange illumination mode options), as do the speakers and USB-C port on the bottom edge:
Open the case: it still looks, sounds (beep!), and otherwise acts legit.
Earbuds out: Charging contacts at the bottom of each receptacle.
The earbuds themselves, from various perspectives. Apologies for the earwax remnants 
“That’s odd.”
“That’s odd.” Back in the case for initial pairing, which is where my initial “that’s odd” moment happened (hold that thought for a possible explanation to follow shortly):
I didn’t recall this particular message before, particularly for supposedly brand-new Apple earbuds, but I plunged on and got them paired and associated with my Apple user account straightaway. They automatically also appeared in the paired-Bluetooth-devices listings of all my other Apple widgets. One thing that seemed a little strange upfront was that “Handoff” mode, wherein I could connect to them from another account-associated device even if they were connected to a different device at the time, didn’t seem to work. I instead needed to manually disconnect them from, for example, my iPad before I could connect them to my MacBook Pro. But after a bit of online research, I chalked that up to a potential bug with the earbuds’ current firmware version (7A305, which dated from late September 2024). And about that…check out the three-part post-activation settings listing:
All looks legit, right? The earbuds even claimed that valid warranty coverage existed through June 2025! Activating noise cancellation seemed to do something, although I can’t say it was notably superior (or even equivalent) to what I’d experienced with their first-generation forebears. And when I tried to activate hearing aid mode, it told me that I’d have to update the firmware before that particular feature was available for my use. All reasonable. When I tried “Find My” on them, it couldn’t locate them, but I figured that since I’d just activated them, Apple’s servers were just slow and they’d show up eventually. So, I connected them to my iPad, put them in close proximity to it so that the firmware would auto-update, and…
Mercari’s seller rating policy
Another background-info pause. As soon as USPS delivered the earbuds, Mercari as-usual sent email alerting me that they were at my front door and—this is key—immediately encouraging me to “rate the seller” so he or she could get paid. From past experience, those emails would continue at a one-to-multiple times-per-day cadence until I either reported a problem or went ahead and rated the seller. And here’s the twist that I didn’t realize until afterwards:
- The buyer has only 72 hours after package delivery to report a problem
- In the absence of buyer response to the contrary after (only) 72 hours, Mercari goes ahead and automatically marks the package as received and pays the seller anyway (remember my earlier “seller-friendly” comment about the service?), and
- Once the transaction is complete, Mercari washes its hands (words ironically written by me within the Triduum) of the matter and accepts no further fiscal responsibility.
Did I go ahead and rate the seller that same evening so that he/she could get promptly paid? Bathed in the “giddiness glow” of a seeming legit transaction…yes, I did. Sigh. The next morning, of course, when I checked the settings and saw that the firmware had not updated, alarm bells belatedly started going off in my head. Multiple subsequent factory-reset and re-pairs were equally unsuccessful in getting the firmware updated. And then I found this video:
Serial number consistency
wherein I remembered that although the serial number on the packaging matched that on the case and (by default) reported in settings, the serial numbers for the right and left earbuds were supposed to be different in both places. Here, for example, are the serial number markings on the case and earbuds for my first-generation AirPods Pros (apologies again for the earwax bits):
The print is a bit faint, but hopefully you can see that the serial numbers on the earbuds both don’t match those on the case (H6VHW8651059) and are different from each other (H6QHWQRX06CJ and H6VHX88Q0C6K).
Now here’s the settings listing entry of interest for the “fakes”. If you click on it, it’ll report unique serial numbers for the case and each earbud:
And the model numbers stamped on the case and both earbuds are also different, and match what they should be. But the stamped serial numbers on all three? Identical: DT601W1T41.
And are, I’m guessing, also identical to the serial numbers stamped on and reported by who-knows-how-many other identical “fakes” also sold by “Skii” and others, which is why I got the initial “not your” notification at the beginning of the pairing process. Apple, is it not possible to detect and more meaningfully alert owners when multiple sets of earbuds with identical serial numbers are activated? You have both fiscal and reputational motivations to do so, after all.
I’m begrudgingly impressed with the degree to which these counterfeit earbuds mimic the real thing. And here’s the twist: were I the owner of only a single Apple device, such as an iPhone, therefore unaware of the “Handoff” glitch, and were I a typical non-geeky (non-Brian) consumer, unaware how to determine the existing firmware version, far from what the current version is, how to update it and what it would add to my usage experience…I might be blissfully unaware far into the future that I’d bought a cheap-but-fake set of earbuds …maybe forever.
Reporting the fake to Mercari
I reported the situation in detail, complete with pictures, to Mercari. Throughout the subsequent email back-and-forth, they several times reminded me that:
When you submit a rating for your transaction, you are prompted to confirm you understand that once the rating is submitted, the sale is final. Once submitted, funds are released to the seller and we are no longer able to process a return or refund. Moving forward, if you receive an item that is not as described, please do not submit a rating for your seller and contact us immediately.
That said, they also made a promise:
Please know that if a report is made against the seller we will conduct an investigation to confirm the suspicions. If the seller is found guilty immediate action will be taken against them regarding their listings. I appreciate for your concerns and just for you we will further review this for you. Your case will be taken as a feedback and we do value your time in reaching out to us to inform us of this inquiry.
and:
Regarding your seller’s action, please note that our team is very vigilant with those kinds of activities. We will conduct monitoring where we will need to check all their transactions and make sure that our Trust and Safety team will review this concern. Please leave it to us, rest assured that the right sanction will be given accordingly.
It’s been two weeks since I filed my report. “Skii” is still on Mercari. And as I write these words, he or she has three more “authentic” AirPods Pro 2 sets for sale. Admittedly, “Skii” may not even know that the earbuds being sold are fakes. Although I doubt it. Caveat emptor, indeed.
Then there was this closing email from Mercari:
Thank you for reaching out to Mercari! We hope your issue was resolved to your satisfaction.
We would appreciate it if you could take a moment to provide us with your feedback. Your input helps us improve our service. Thank you for helping us serve you better!
Grrr.
I plan to “turn lemons into lemonade” via future teardowns of both the case and one of the earbuds, comparing them to existing published teardowns of legit alternatives. Until then, I welcome your thoughts in the comments on what I’ve written so far on this “fakes” saga.
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
Related Content
- Hands-on review: Is a premium digital audio player worth the price?
- Memory cards: Specifications and (more) deceptions
- USB activation dongles: Counterfeit woes
- Apple’s latest product launch event takes flight
- Apple’s fall 2024 announcements: SoC and memory upgrade abundance
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