As consumers, we bear some responsibility in knowing the knives we're buying, or at least checking them out before sending payment. There are so many counterfeits on eBay that you really have to watch what you're buying. I got so fed up with things that for several months, I bought four or five counterfeit knives a day (many with prior bids) and then canceled my transactions on the basis that they were fraudulent. Then I'd leave blistering feedback and report the whole thing to eBay. Didn't take a whole lot of time and it was effective.
Many are billed as Spydercos. Many are billed as CRKTs and Cold Steel. Some are billed as Gerbers, though if you buy those counterfeits, odds are you'll end up with a better knife than if you'd bought a real Gerber.
When one sees a Cold Steel Recon-1 with a linerlock locking system, you can safely assume it's fake. If you go to Google, you can select "Images" and find pictures of the real knives. If they don't match, don't buy them. Some differences are subtle, but there are usually many differences you can see.
Ebay can be a bit lazy when you report items, but if you buy them, cancel the transactions, leave blistering feedback and report them to Ebay, you can have some satisfying moments. Back when lots of Chinese places were selling these crummy mp3 players that were 2GB (but advertised as 4), I'd buy those and then cancel, because I know the firmware had been scizzled to report 4GBs when the device was formatted. In reality, the files were written to the 2GB capacity, then the device would begin copying the rest of the files and overwriting the first. It made it appear just to be defective and, of course, most people wouldn't go through the hassle of sending them all the way back to China, so I bought dozens of them sometime and has all my evidence so I could copy and paste. I tissed off a lot of Chinese sellers, but also helped force Ebay into finally investigating them and locking these things out.
