What do you when you’re a maker of illegal Chinese iPhone knockoffs and the police come with a battering ram to your door? It starts raining fake iPhone 5s. Hallelujah?
When the police arrived at the Shenzhen shop, four Chinese iPhone knockoff dealers decided to get rid of the evidence… by flinging almost a thousand clone smartphones, including one purporting to be the still unreleased, unannounced iPhone 5 out of their windows.
The only problem? They were eighteen stories up. Although no one was hurt, several cars and fences were smashed by the deluge of fake Apple products.
When police finally bashed in their doors, the four men were burning transaction records, but the police managed to recover a customers database.
By the time police restrained the men, they had managed to throw 656 fake iPhones with 140 fake cases out of the window. The men are now in custody.
Why the sudden zealousness on the part of Chinese authorities to crack down on the black market iPhone knockoff trade? The World University Summer Games is taking place in August, and local authorities don’t want foreigners to get burned on the bum iPhones. Maybe it’s more acceptable to be bombarded with them instead?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
34 responses to “Hundreds Of Fake iPhone 5s Hurled Out Of 18th Story Window”
DUDE! You’re gettin’ a cell! — From: Dude! You’re gettin’ a Dell!
The more interesting question to me is: What do the fake iPhone 5s look like, and where did they get the design?
Gente que clona iPhone. Aff
Good for the police. I hope they throw those iPhone cloning pricks under the jail cell. Trying to pass off Android crap as an iPhone is despicable.
lol
Ditto
Agreed…Why would you want to sully android by making it look like iCrap?
I’m impressed by the photo on the iphone 5 box and it’s packaging. These guys need to start a legit business!
I think jail is a bit heavy.
No worries folks! This is China, so those evil phone thieves will be put in jail to have their organs harvested for aging party officials! Getting exactly what they deserve.
And for those that think I’m kidding… wait till China gets more powerful and doesn’t need to hide their atrocities. Try not to forget the real criminals here are the Chinese government, the poor people of the nation blissfully unaware until they commit a petty crime and get hanged for it.
How do we know they are fake, the iPhone 5 isn’t out yet ;)
look at the back of your legit iphone… you will see “assembled in china”.
These things get proto’d, and premanufactured to make sure that the tooling and process is up to QC standards…. it explains how they can get other designs early.
I think if you do something illegal your asking for it. There’s something called the law for a reason.
If you see a hobo in China with an iFone 5…this explains it.
Just like the US-government with Guantánamo you mean?..
Only in China…