When I was working for a microprocessor company (which you use everyday) many many years ago, they were selling this JTAG debugger for a few thousand $ each. The cpu architecture was booming in China at that time, but that $ figure is not something people can afford. Clones started to flood the market pretty fast, a typical clone set you back for a few hundred $, that was already 1/10 of the original price.

However, that was still considered too expensive - then there was this vendor in Shanghai which came up a clone they sell for around $100 - after talking to them via some unofficial channels, we figured out that they had people stationed in those electronics dump sites to source the chips required. In those place, you don't pay for each chip, you pay for a kg price, e.g. I want 10kg of that chip, how much each kg please?

10+ years on, those engineers who first studied that CPU architecture back then using those cloned JTAG debugger are now pretty experienced/better paid, they are probably the ones complaining fake/reused chips on some Chinese forums claiming they are the victims.