Patently Apple:
Late yesterday Apple filed a trademark infringement cases against Mobile Star LLC for selling counterfeit power products such as power adapters and charging cables through Amazon.com. Apple believes these counterfeit products could lead to fires and are therefore a risk to the public.
Apple recently purchased a number of Apple power adapters and charging and syncing cables (collectively “power products”) that were directly sold by Amazon.com – not a third party seller – and determined that they were counterfeit. Amazon.com informed Apple that Mobile Star was its source for the majority of these counterfeit Apple products.
Apple’s internal examination and testing for these products revealed almost 90% of these products are counterfeit.
It’s understandable why people want to buy adapters and cables from third parties because the Apple-branded ones are ridiculously expensive. But, their quality is undoubtedly suspect which is why Apple wants them off the market.
The problem here isn’t merely third party cables that are marked as such, but ones that are labeled as Apple-made and use counterfeit Apple-packaging.
Fraud pure and simple. Amazon’s treatment of workers and its condoning this sort of thing says a lot about Bezos.
Talk about oversimplifying the issue. The problem isn’t third party adapters. The problem is COUNTERFEIT adapters with known safety risks and quality issues being labeled and sold by Amazon as genuine Apple products. These aren’t just being sold by the third party marketplace, they were sold to consumers from Amazons official listing for the genuine product, some of them were supplied to Amazon by this fraudster and sold to consumers as genuine.
Amazon’s bullshit practices and complete disregard for genuine product sourcing is just as responsible, and should be sued as well in my opinion. Amazon likes to hide behind a little curtain and absolve themselves of any responsibility, but when they source products from sketchy companies and use them to supply the supposedly genuine product listing, they are 100% responsible as well. The whole system is so contrived and impossible for an average consumer to understand, its downright shameful.
I have to agree with the others here. It’s one thing to sell a charger… It’s another thing to sell a knock off charger at Apple prices with the Apple logo that could kill people.
But make no mistake: Amazon is the major culprit here, for allowing it to happen.
Agreed.
How can Amazon justify selling this under their name as genuine when they didn’t source it from apple?
burn, galatica, burn…
Once,after news stories of shocks & even an electrocution, Apple went so far as to offer a trade-in to buyers of the knock-offs, to protect their brand. I’ve personally gotten a nasty shock from a Brand-X. Life’s already too short to screw around with these bottom-feeders.
Amazon doesn’t have a lot of morals. I don’t know about the US store but the Canadian store allows scumbags to sell items at 2 or 3 times manufacturers suggested retail. I’m guessing they do this to trap naive seniors into purchases. I’ve complained to Amazon Canada and never received a reply.
I’d never buy Apple gear of any kind from Amazon; their umbrella hides too many knockoffs of other items.
When I go off-brand for Apple accessories, I usually get them from someone like OWC/Newertech. Apple certified, thicker cables, choice of colors.