Receiving luxury Christmas presents is great. Giving them, however, has one major downside: Luxury Christmas gifts are expensive as shit. Perhaps that’s why the business of peddling counterfeit items like fake iPhone 6 smartphones and knockoff Louis Vuittons is flourishing on darknet markets like Evolution.
Vocativ pulled together a list of counterfeit goods easily available to buy as Christmas gifts using darknet markets, primarily Evoluion and Agora. For people willing to run the risk of using platforms specializing in the sales of illegal merchandise, there are pennies to be pinched. A fake Patek Philippe Calatrava 3802 will set you back a hefty $US460, but that’s a lot cheaper than its $US13,790 retail price.
A fake 16 GB iPhone 6 retails for $US200, down from the $US650 you’ll pay at the Apple Store for the real thing. The only problem? It runs Android. OK, not the only problem, you still have to contend with the utter lack of guarantee as to the quality of hardware and software, plus you’ll have to pay with bitcoin. But you’ll have to come up with one hell of a lie about why a seemingly authentic iPhone has been rejiggered to run the software of its principle rival.
You can also find fake Beats by Dre if you want to excite (and then later inevitably disappoint when they break and you have no warrantee because they’re knockoffs) the tween in your life. They’re selling for less than $US60 on Evolution, compared to the $US380 retail price.
I’m not going to lie and tell you there are no good knockoffs. And I’m not going to make an argument about the value in shelling out $US380 for authentic mediocre headphones so that Dr. Dre can get richer. I will, though, point out that even the best knockoff is illegal, and there is no money-back policy if you think you’re ordering a flawless recreation of a Galaxy Note and you get shipped the worst bootleg hunk of plastic you’ve ever seen, and finishing your holiday shopping with darknet counterfeits is taking a huge gamble. It’s better to simply buy a more affordable gift than try to pass off a fake as the real deal. [Vocativ]