"Possible Recast by China" Topic

I was browsing ebay and saw a listing for some 1/72 Germans in foxholes. They are from a firm in China, Toysra. They look an awful lot like the 20mm figures from AB. They have many more and they all bear a striking resemblance to AB figures (I own a lot of AB WW2).

Sorry I can't post links, but a quick search of bay will show you what I'm talking about.

AB got hit by pirates quite awhile ago and is all over EBay.

Lots of painted Napoleonics from China are bootlegs.

They are recasts, seem to be more expensive than the originals,

Tally Ho!

shopping places in China opening now sell counterfeit US postage stamps. Like those 10,000 ads they run for cheap stamps on facebook. but also places like alibaba and temu. Then they take advantage of a sweetheart6 deal to have the USPS deliver them to the USA. But for some reason the USPS will not do a damn thing about it.

But like just about everything else, China rips off IP and no one can touch them. I heard from AB a while back they had all their WW2 stuff stolen and recast in resin, and there was not one damn thing they could do about it, except people would not buy those.

Pretty much anything that someone could make money on is cranked out in China. Action figures are routinely made up after hours in the original molds above and beyond the ordered amount, and then sold by mail- which you can 'sometimes tell' as they use poor quality plastic, and have bad paint jobs.

Don't even get started on all the fake silver and gold coins that now come from China. If you see a deal on silver coins (actual US silver coins), they are almost certainly made in China and sold by mail or flea market- which is just plain counterfiting- and again, no one lifts a finger.

Down in Ecuador, at a lot of the neighborhood stores, you can definitely find the Chinese knock-off action figures being sold, sometimes with slightly changed names (The Revengers, for example). The bigger chains sell the legitimate stuff, still, so there is still a market for that (and I think actual fans know this as well, there). The Chinese knock-offs often looked poorly painted, and that was the key way to tell the difference.

Damon.

Hard to believe we're doing nothing about all the blatant rip-offs that China is doing!

I reported the listing to ebay, but what a cumbersome process. They certainly don't seem to take this very seriously.

"If you see a deal on silver coins (actual US silver coins), they are almost certainly made in China and…"

According to some numismatic websites, if you see them in person, an easy way to check is to put a magnet up against them (they are usually silver-plated steel. Or should I say "steal"…? ;-)

I saw the AB recasts a few weeks ago, ironically l was painting the same figures that l bought from Eureka UK. The recasts were more expensive and of poor quality, a greedy thief!

I reported them to eBay a while back, as noted they are resin, not metal and more expensive than the AB originals.

Did eBay do anything? Lol! Nope not a thing…

As long as you remember eBay is a pirate bazaar you won't go wrong. Caveat emptor…

Ebay doesn't care. I reported a guy who was selling my figures that he never returned -- I never heard a word from ebay.

This site is typical of what is seen all across Europe. Rip offs from China;

link

Nic Robson and I were never able to get eBay to do anything about pirated AB stuff. There are hundreds of listings and you basically have to complain about each one, and each complaint gets ignored.

The fact that pirated AB figures are now on sale at more than the price of buying genuine figures is just staggering. I guess even the pirates at last have worked out the true costs of producing them.:-)

Isn't everything gaming related coming out of China a pirated copy?

I bought some 'Front Rank' SYW figures from one of these Chinese sites on eBay. Previously I used DPs who operated out of Hong Kong, but unless they've changed name I can't find them anymore. DPS were excellent and genuine and used genuine FR figures. These SYW figures were obviously recasts as they were more like 25mm than 28mm, when stood next to genuine FR figures they looked like their dwarvish neighbours. I notice on their ads on eBay these Chinese firms no longer put the make of the figures, whereas DPS used to.

I am seriously thinking about never using ebay again. Such a rip-off of IP. I remember the glory days of ebay, when it was real people selling their unwanted stuff. Long gone.

Is Etsy any better?

As appalling as the Chinese ripoffs are, don't forget that the greatest intellectual property thieves of the nineteenth century were the citizens of the USA.

I noticed this when searching ebay for Flames of War stuff. A seller named preownedminisales has a seemingly endless supply of stuff Battlefront hasn't produced in years, sometimes a decade.

Lots of fake Chinese clothing sites on Facebook offering name brands at ridiculous pricing. They do nothing about it even though the same ad can run at different times and its already proven to be fake