There Are Lots of FAKE Apple Stores Across China!

By Chris Chang, posted Jul 20, 2011 at 9:29 AM, 8,948 views,

There Are Lots of FAKE Apple Stores Across China!

We love to see the cheap knockoffs of Apple products, but if you ask us what is the best Apple knockoff on Earth, we would love to introduce you the fake Apple stores appearing across China recently. These stores really look like Apple store, and interestingly, they feature a glowing Apple logo outside the store. And we could not believe employees from these fake Apple stores are wearing blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks too. Want to know more? We managed to get an inside story of one of these fake Apple stores, and we are shocked when we hear that the owner was originally an Apple authorized reseller.

You may heard or seen the news of a beautiful ripoff Apple store in Kunming, a city located hundreds of miles from the only genuine Apple Stores in China over in Beijing and Shanghai. Yeah, the story tells us that an American couple living in Kunming came across a fake Apple store where the place is so realistic that at first they placed bets as to whether it might actually be a real one. Maybe you should see how real it is in the gallery below.

Fake Apple Store in Kunming

It looked like an Apple store. Different kinds of real Apple products are put on wooden tables. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and an upstairs sitting area. Employees were even wearing blue t-shirts with the Apple name tags around their necks. However, taking a clearer look, these features have defects. First, the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly. Second, the name tags around the necks of the salespeople didn’t actually have names on them – just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation “Staff”. Third, “Apple Store” is written on the sign of the store, while Apple never writes “Apple Store” on it’s signs, we just see a glowing Apple logo.

You may ask, who is the owner of this fake Apple store? How did he get the Apple products to put in the store for sale? Well, we managed to get some exclusive info from one of the customers who always visit this store to use the MacBooks to surf the net. Here’s what we know.

The store has been open for one and a half years, it had an Apple authorized reseller license for half a year until it was caught selling new products at much higher prices than Apple allows. It is located in Kunming and the owner has some connections with people in the Shanghai Apple store in Pudong, this is how he gets Apple’s sales charts and posters. By going online to portal.apple.com you can access this. Also of note he gets his product from the grey market, like all unlicensed Apple resellers. His prices are quite high due to import duties. The owner is from Guangdong and owns a store in Shenzhen and also in Hangzhou. Sales are strong, but he has many customer complaints…

That’s the most interesting stuff we have heard… And when we heard that the owner has other stores, we quickly check out these fake Apple stores in other cities of China. See the gallery below to take a look at what we found.

Gallery: Fake Apple Stores Across China

Awesome. We found more fake Apple stories across China!! We are surprised that we are seeing these stores at Chengdu, Xianyang, and Zhongshan. Almost all the stores have glowing Apple logo, wooden tables, authentic Apple products, employees wearing blue t-shirts, and most amazingly, some of the stores are built just like the real Apple stores!