Skip to Content

Fake iPhones seized from LA warehouse

Police in the port of Los Angeles have seized what they say is over $10 million worth of counterfeit Apple devices from a warehouse. The fake iPods, iPhones and iPod touches were reportedly brought in from Asia recently, and they were supposedly going to be sold around CES this past year, duping customers into thinking they were buying real Apple products for cheap. Not that cheap, though -- the cops also reportedly found receipts in the warehouse, along with other stolen and counterfeit merchandise, that pointed to the whole facility bringing in around $7 million in profit.

Two brothers have been arrested, and the two of them face a total of four felony counts for the sale of counterfeit goods. The seizure was the result of an ongoing stolen cargo investigation that had the Port Police looking around warehouses in Los Angeles and Vernon, CA late last year.



Categories

Apple iPhone

Police in the port of Los Angeles have seized what they say is over $10 million worth of counterfeit Apple devices from a warehouse. The...
 

Add a Comment

*0 / 3000 Character Maximum Comment Moderation Enabled. Your comment will appear after it is cleared by an editor.

9 Comments

Filter by:
designr

According to one of the local L.A. stations, these 'knockoffs' were assembled in China from legitimate replacement parts purchased fraudulently on the black market.

February 08 2011 at 2:30 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to designr's comment
designr

I had a boss back in the day who resold new Macs after first replacing the Apple OEM parts (hard drives, RAM) with cheap imitation parts...

and then sell the Apple OEM parts back to the same suckers when the cheap imitation parts failed.

February 08 2011 at 2:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
JKT

I thought by now everyone had used an iPhone and therefore knew what one looked like and how it worked. So I don't get how many of these they'd even have been able to sell...

February 07 2011 at 11:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to JKT's comment
HazyCloud

I've seen someone at the office with a fake iPhone. Normally I'd laugh it off, but this person really thought they had one. It was clearly from a flea market or something. It upset me since the iPhony worked so bad, the person thought iPhones sucked. She ended up giving it to her son because it worked so poorly. Now the lady has a tainted image of Apple and will probably never buy a real iPhone(not that she knows the difference). I can now see why companies don't want counterfeit products out there. People do actually think they are real.

February 08 2011 at 9:12 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
glad

The two arrested wouldn't happen to be asian?

February 07 2011 at 10:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to glad's comment
tdowling

Middle Eastern, maybe? Bahram and Edward Zahab

February 07 2011 at 10:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
glad

cheers

February 08 2011 at 1:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gilles

There was no fake Android phones ?

February 07 2011 at 9:26 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Crack it

NO THAT'S THE iPHONE 5s APPLE was going to "accidentally" leave in a bar!

February 07 2011 at 8:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buy an ad here

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.