Chinese police in Shanghai have arrested a gang of five people for making and selling fake iPhones on the black market. Unlike the other fake iPhones we’ve seen, however, these ones were made using a selection of real iPhone parts.
Despite them being fake, however, the iPhones aren’t a great deal cheaper than Apple’s:
The cost to make one fake iPhone, which used some genuine parts, was around 2,000 yuan ($313). It was sold on unauthorized markets and on the Internet for around 4,000 yuan, only a few hundred yuan cheaper than the real iPhone, the newspaper said.
The fake iPhones had the same functions as the genuine ones but had a shorter battery life, it quoted the police as saying.
“It’s really hard for customers to distinguish the fake ones from the genuine ones,” an officer was quoted as saying.
Although the device is claimed to have the same functions as a real iPhone, we struggle to believe that it would have iOS installed on it. It’s likely that another operating system — skinned to look like iOS — is installed instead.
[via 9to5 Mac]
