Apple has long had to deal with unscrupulous counterfeiters creating and hawking fake iPods and iPhones–any fashion house would say it’s the price for having the sexiest products–but now the company is faced with deception on a much larger scale, with whole retail locations set up to look like authentic Apple stores (with varying degrees of success) popping up around the globe.

Ironically, these stores are often selling authentic Apple products–likely the result of profitable and illegal resale efforts.

The stores seem especially popular in parts of China, where the attention to detail–from poured concrete floors to winding staircases to sparse, product-lined blond wood tables–can be so precise as to make it difficult to ascertain at first glance whether or not the store is legit. And even when they’re not, the employees may not know it, according to an article in Bits ^[1], which says “employees actually believe they work for Apple” and “wander the store assisting customers and wear standard Apple T-shirts, which are bright blue with a clean white Apple logo across the chest” as well as “Apple employee identification cards that say ‘Staff’” around their necks.

Apple–the real Apple–made no comment to the author of the source article about the counterfeit stores.

Read more at Bits ^[1].