Cheap Macs from China?

[unknown1]

I got an email from a friend that looked like spam so I checked the headers out and looked for tracking beacons and everything looked OK. It directed me to a Chinese website that has some amazing deals on previous generation Mac products and a lot of other electronics.

http://www.ele-zone.com/nsort_11.htm for Macs

They have 2GHz MacBooks for $470! and a 17" 1.67GHz PowerBook for $680!

Are these guys for real? Has anyone heard of this? I often buy small things like cables direct from Hong Kong on eBay for good prices but have never seen this low of prices on larger items. I'm sure shipping is high but maybe this is where all those 'like new' and 'refurbished' Macs come from on eBay...

If I ever bought something from them I would use my Firefox PayPal plugin, so as not to reveal Credit Card info.

Of course I'm broke too, but that point not withstanding...

Maybe if I sell all fourteen or so of my old Macs off I could buy one 'almost new' one?!? :^)

[Turboladdade]

Those prices do seem pretty low to me, but I'm always always leery about buying anything from China, the capital of counterfeit goods. Although, it would be really hard to convincingly counterfeit Apple's computers because of their highly refined construction would make fakers obvious. My gut feeling is scam, rather than counterfeit - you send them money and they don't send you product.

I Googled the domain and this came up: http://www.fraudwatchers.org/forums/arc ... 17603.html

It describes how this site shares identical FAQ pages and site templates as many other similar sites. This is usually a pretty good indicator of a scam operation running many sites.

Somebody could try testing it out by buying a cheaper product. I see that they have iPod Minis for $75.

[icicles]

Play it safe, stick to the United States.