A local dealer had an unhappy customer come in with cables the customer bought on the internet which he thought sounded crappy. I heard it and it was indeed crappy, particularly surprising because the cables were supposedly ultra expensive Audio Note Sogon cables. When the terminations were cut off to look at the actual wire, it was NOT the right internals. The wires were pretty nice looking fakes with genuine Audio Note spades on them. Were they Chinese fakes? I don't know the origin, but, Chinese fakes are getting impressively hard to detect visually. I saw a line stage supposedly made with Western Electric parts where all the parts turned out to be fake (it did not sound good).
A dealer/builder I know was looking for some Western Electric input transformers to make a high-end clone of their 133 amp. A Chinese source was offering a pair for $10,000. This is the going rate of those transformers. It may have been genuine, but, it may just be the case of the fakers getting wise--don't sell your fakes at deep discount, that only raises suspicions; sell it at the going rate and make even more money.
I've seen fake tubes, fake cables, fake capacitors, fake transformers, and stuff to help you make your own fakes, like company decals.
