SME V Tonearm on eBay Hong Kong Sellers are FAKE!!!

Illegal in U.S. as well. 

https://m.ebay.com/itm/Sme-V-Tonearm-With-Denon-DL-103R-Pro-Cartridge-apply-Garrard-Micro-Sata/25349...

They're back! And someone is already bidding and will get ripped off. Or the clueless guy will use it and never know what a real SME should look like and sound like.

I reported. More people should do the same.

Real SME is beautifully machined and fit and finish is perfection. Fake SME in the photos is made with every part being rough cast out of something. Fit and finish is garbage, misaligned parts, gaps, etc. Printing is garbage. Leads are wrong.

All the way down to the fake Canare tonearm cable (which SME never even used before) with wrong printing.

These people are 100% disgusting criminals. Report. And stay away.

@raymonda I don’t know if all of those are fake. But for example, the picture showing the Nagra’s internals has been stolen from one of the big online review sites. So that’s a red flag already. I don’t have time to go through everything to verify.

Some stuff might be real, some fake, others may have real stolen pictures but who knows what you’ll get.

SME I know by heart, so the V they have listed on eBay is without a doubt a fake item.

Another giveaway, I just looked at the history and they sell SME V several times a month for as long as eBay allows one to look back. For the other items they do not have previous sales, so they might be real.

Think logically, where are they getting so many V tonearms to sell used?

Some unknowing fool bought that fake tonearm for $2125 during the last auction a week ago.

Since January 1st of this year, those scumbags have sold 7 fake SME V tonearms, averaging $2000 per sale. 

I reported most of them. eBay took absolutely no action against them. eBay gets a several hundred dollar cut from each sale and they couldn't care less if the product is real or not, or if the buyers are getting ripped off. 

@lewm I have filed multiple complaints with eBay and they did not even bother responding to a single one. I’ve been a member on eBay since the late 90’s with a huge 100% feedback. But I guess that doesn’t matter to them. So long as the buyer is clueless and doesn’t complain and eBay gets paid, it’s business as usual.

This is a huge problem. As those fake tonearms will eventually circle back into the marketplace. They probably also sound horrendous and give SME a bad rep.