China Also Has Fake Apple Stores Online

Reports of the brick-and-mortar fake Apple Stores in Kunming and elsewhere in China are by now old news. But in China, online shopping is a rapidly-growing market; what about shoppers who want to get the fake-Apple-Store experience from the comfort of their own home? Thankfully, they’ve got options.

TechWeb published a story today called “Fake Apple Websites Wreak Havoc on the Internet.” In it, they relate what has become a fairly common tale:

Recently, urban resident Mr. Wang decided he wanted to buy a cell phone. But when he typed “iPhone mobile phone” into the search box on Baidu, he was shocked at some of the recommended results. Mr. Wang said, “There were three recommended links, and two of them had problems. They were imitating the design of Apple’s website and the products they were selling were very shanzhai, very unreliable.” Mr. Wang said that he works in the IT field and is relatively knowledgeable about cell phones, and that while he could easily see through the websites’ deception, some consumers might be tricked.

So just how easy is it to spot these fake Apple Online Stores? You be the judge. We tried the same search as Mr. Wang, and came up with a number of online stores that seem highly dubious.

ChinaMac.com features a design that will look familiar to anyone who has seen the navigation bar on Apple’s website. They don’t actually claim to be an official Apple site, though. And the fact that some of the images are broken ought to be evidence enough this website isn’t the work of a billion-dollar corporation widely known for good design.

Le724.com takes things a bit further, with a fairly slick design (again, the nav bar looks pretty familiar) on top of a bold claim. “Apple’s Official Chinese Site,” the title banner proclaims (it isn’t, of course). And with this kind of design, there probably are shoppers who take them at their word.

AppleApple Channel — yes, the title says Apple twice, once in each language — doesn’t look as good as Le724, but it has that same familiar nav bar. It also claims to be the official website of Apple in Chinese, although not directly on the page; “official Chinese Apple site” appears only in the HTML title so that it’s the first thing people see when they’re scrolling through search results.