Slashdot Mirror
Knock-Off Apple Watches Hit the Chinese Market Less Than 24 Hours After Launch
schwit1 writes Fake versions of the Apple Watch can be bought for as little as £25 — despite the fact the real thing will set you back more than 10 times that. The flagship new product was only launched in San Francisco yesterday but knock-offs are already available in China. According to CNN Money, they can be found at Huaqiangbei electronics market in the southern city of Shenzhen, and others are being sold nationwide via popular e-commerce websites. Right down to the digital crown, the fakes mimic the design and style of Apple's new offering.
Actually, they are tungsten bars, specially made and coated with gold. No lead.
Federal reserve bought hundreds of thousends of tungsten bars during Clinton precidency times. Years ago there was a big "ruckus" between China and US, becouce chinese were not trusting the fort knox chipment og gold bars and tested all the bars. They all were fake bars, no gold only gold coated tungsten.
In October 2009, China reportedly received a large shipment of gold, containing some 6,000 bars, weighing 400 ounces each. When it was received, the Chinese government asked that tests be performed to guarantee the purity and weight of the gold bars. In this test, four small holes were drilled into the bars, and the metal was analyzed. Officials were shocked to find the bars were bogus. They contained cores of tungsten, with only an outer coating of real gold. What’s more, these gold bars, containing serial numbers for tracking, originated in the United States and had reportedly been stored in Fort Knox for years.
Tungsten is vastly cheaper than gold—maybe $30 dollars a pound, compared to $1,200 an ounce for gold right now. It has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. Therefore, it has to be drilled to detect the fraud. The only differences are that it’s the wrong color, and that it’s much harder than gold. Pure gold is soft and can be dented with a fingernail.
At first, many gold experts speculated that the fake gold must have originated in China, which is considered the world’s best knock-off producers. However, the Chinese government investigated and issued a statement pointing a finger squarely at the United States.
The Chinese claim that in 1995—during the Clinton administration (Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers)—between 1.3 million and 1.5 million 400-ounce tungsten blanks were manufactured by a sophisticated refiner in the United States, amounting to more than 16,000 metric tons. Some 640,000 of these tungsten blanks were then gold plated and shipped to Fort Knox, according to the Chinese, where they are said to remain to this day. The Chinese contend that the remaining collection of these 400-ounce fakes was eventually gold-plated and then “sold” into international markets.
The global market is literally “stuffed full of 400 ounce salted bars,” said one unnamed expert. “It’s enough to destroy the world markets.”