iPhone terminal clones are extremely sought after in China because they have much lower prices than the real devices, but they look exactly like an Apple product, real businesses being created based on them.
One of these businesses was recently closed down by the Beijing police, the officers putting a lock on a production line that manufactured no less than 41.000 counterfeit iPhone terminals in just 5 months, their total value amounting to 19 millions of dollars.
Based on legislation that punishes intellectual theft much more rigorously, the police arrested no less than 9 people who were involved in the management of this business, which was created by a man together with his wife, the factory being located in the basement of a GSM service in the city of Beijing.
Although the arrests were made in May, the police only now provided this information to the advertisers, the authorities claiming that the factory was created in January and had 6 months of production with hundreds of employees who created counterfeit iPhones that were then sold .
Police in Beijing have busted a factory that produced more than 41,000 fake iPhones worth as much as 120 million yuan ($19 million), including some that reached the United States, and have arrested nine suspects in the counterfeiting operation. They hired "hundreds" of workers to repackage second-hand smartphone components as iPhones for export, it added.
Thanks to the help provided by the American authorities, the police in Beijing seized no less than 14.000 smartphones and large quantities of accessories, so that not all of the 41.000 counterfeit iPhones were sold by those in Beijing.
According to the authorities, the Chinese assembled various components in cases similar to those of the iPhone and sold them together with the Android operating system, earning a serious amount of money in the process, but all with a limit that pleased the Chinese authorities.
In practice, in the 5 months of activity, that factory produced approximately 10.000 counterfeit iPhones daily, if the production was limited only to the cloning of Apple terminals, not to the cloning of other smartphones.
