A fellow blogger asked me recently for my opinion of a site that offers Apple products at a great discount, specifically a new iPhone 5C for Sprint for only $129.00. Here is my easy answer: it's a scam. Used genuine iPhone 5Cs on eBay sell for over $200.00. New ones would sell for more than twice as much.

If you can answer the following question then you can tell if what is being sold is real or bogus: why would anyone want to sell a product for $129.00 if they can sell all their entire inventory on eBay for twice as much?

Obviously the item is bogus and the website a scammer operation. I won't link to it directly but it calls itself applesshops.com. The website was registered a little more than a week ago, its server is located in France, but is a Chinese entity based in Changsha, China.

My son, who runs a number of smartphone screen repair shops, has seen a number of these Chinese clones when the owners come in to get them repaired when they abruptly stop working. These cellphones do not use any Apple operating system, nor are any of the internal components worth the money; for example, the camera does not have the megapixel capacity of a real iPhone. After a few weeks these phones will either stop charging, stop making calls, or stop working altogether. In other words they're iCrap.

Don't waste your time or money on them.