[Nexus 6  General] najoor:
You didn't share any links so it is hard to know what the situation was other than the fact that you feel ripped of by the unauthentic looking phone. But let me share my own experience of buying what seemed like new phones and how that turned out.

I really like Samsung Note 3. I think it was one of the best phones ever made, not because it has the best performance or build, simply because it is a good toy; it is easy to root and a lot of development has been done on it. You can tear it apart and put it back together in 5 minutes. It is not full of glue and impossible to reach corners. After 3 years used Note 3 phones still get sold at prices higher than some mid tier phones. I also have an S7 edge but I rarely use it. It is just not as much fun.

It is because of that, that I have owned 6 of them so far. If I break them I either fix them or get another one. And since it is not sold in retail stores anymore the only place to get them is Ebay.

Six months ago I found one advertised as a new T-Mobile phone on Ebay for ~$240 but it would be shipped from Hong Kong. I was curious how a T Mobile phone would actually be sold in Hong Kong? But with today's global economy it would not be a far stretch of imagination so I went ahead and ordered it. Took about a month to get it and when I opened the box I could swear the thing was a new phone. Everything was correct down to the T Mobile logo on the box.

After a few days I realized that, as new as the thing looks on the outside, it was in fact not a T Mobile phone. The LCD had an image burned into it which was visible especially on a blue background. It had clearly been used as a demo unit for a long time showing the same image over and over, which had gotten burnt into the OLED display. The headset connector had been used 366 times, charger connector 1216 times, and S pen had been detached 313 times. So the phone had been used extensively.

I dug a bit more into the hardware of the phone and I found that the model number hardcoded into the phone was SM-N900TZKETMB which is the model number for a black phone. This phone was white so clearly the frame and the back had been changed. I should have known better because the phone had a gold trim. T Mobile never sold this phone in this color.

I called Samsung and they said the phone had run out of warranty. I actually guessed it myself because again I could access the hardcoded info in the phone and I knew it had been manufactured more than 2 years before the purchase date.

So, in summary, this was not a new phone. This is a refurbished phone, albeit masterfully refurbished. I emphasize that it was not a copy. I verified myself that it has all the genuine hardware inside. So I ended up returning it for a refund.

A few months later, I found a "new" T-Mobile Sony Xperia Z3 on Ebay, another one of my favorites, sold from Hong Kong. Went ahead and ordered it, just to go through the same ordeal. If you know one thing about Z3 it is probably the fact that it has a great camera. The camera on this one was horrible. I have never before or since seen a camera that bad. The LCD was dim with uneven brightness, and some other problems... you get the picture. I ended up returning that as well. Later, I found out that T Mobile never sold this phone in this color either, so fool me once...

A couple of months passed by and I figured that since I like Note 3 and that white phone with the gold trim actually looked good, knowing that I will get a refurbished phone, I should go ahead and order another one from Hong Kong. After all, it was the original hardware in a refurbished shell, so what could go wrong. I ordered it and it came, again, in a sealed box with all bells and whistles. This time however, the phone would not function properly. It would not attach to T Mobile LTE network and even after putting the right APN etc, I would lose connection after every reboot. I started looking into the hardware. I found that it was in fact an N9005 (international model) refurbished as a N900T!!! They had force-flashed the T Mobile ROM on it and in the process had blown the knox fuse, which was a deal breaker since I need to use the phone in a secure corporate environment. That phone went back to Hong Kong as well.

So three phones from three different vendors all having the same problem. Why?

Because there is a cottage industry in China that buys used phones from the US and other countries. They clean them up, replace the exterior frame, replace any broken components with aftermarket parts, and they even print the exact same brochures, boxes, and plastic wrappings to masquerade them as new, and they sell them on the internet. This is a step-up from the fake phones they used to make a few years ago so at least the hardware inside is mostly authentic, but they are dishonest and will easily lie to you about the phones being new. The above-mentioned phones were all shipped, not from Hong Kong, but from China through Hong Kong. Not everyone is picky like me to go through all this trouble to test and return these effectively used products. Some people just use the phone to make phone calls, which most of these phone do very well anyway.

I do not want to disrespect the Chinese. But in the consumer electronics sector, this is unethical and I see it being done more and more by them. Selling low grade goods disguised as original products to people erodes the buyers confidence. Five years ago if I wanted to buy a replacement LCD on Ebay, I could find some at the $100 dollar price mark and some at the $10 level, which would tell me which one it the Chinese low quality crap so I could stay away from it. Today, I want to buy a Sony LCD on Ebay and I have a price range from $20 to $50 and there is no guarantee that the $50 is any better than the $20 one. For what I know they may have all come from the same crappy low quality manufacturing line in Shenzhen.