Interesting Exercise

A friend passed along a link from Facebook for a heavily-discounted Lego Millenium Falcon, asking if it was one I already had, implying I may be interested. And at a glance, it is kind of appealing, even if I don't really need another model to put around somewhere. The pictures catch the eye, of course, and you see the Ultimate Collector Series Falcon, which is huge and sells for $800 give or take. Then you see it marked down to $49.95. Wow!

I'm a pessimist, though, and that immediately starts triggering red flags for me under the "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true" warning.

So I start looking a little closer and some things jump out. The box image doesn't have the Lego logo. in fact, the place where a logo would be is blacked out. The description actually doesn't say Lego anywhere. Hmm. This brought to mind the Chinese Lego bootleg/knockoffs known as Lepin, and a quick search turned up Falcon models from them for around $45. Hmm. I didn't really notice 'til a bit later, but also the images on the customer reviews (which are almost all 5-star) appear to be the smaller (albeit still sizable) Falcon models similar to the one I have. The roof panels that fold open are particularly distinctive.

All this together makes me think the site is probably selling a Lepin kit, and likely not the UCS-copied one, even. Arguably, the price point is still pretty good for a large number of Lego-copied pieces, but it's not of particular interest to me and that kind of shady behavior from a website makes me wonder how secure any identification or credit card information would be with them. I think I'll just stay away in general.

This also caused me to find an article stating that Chinese authorities actually raided and such down a (the?) Lepin-producing factory at the end of April, and the Lepin website states a "temporary" shutdown of production starting May (with no mention of resuming production at any time). Given China's notoriously lax copyright laws and how Lego has been litigating for years, that's actually pretty amazing news that they actually got results.

All very curious to see an analyse from a nice, safe position on the sidelines.

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