I wondered that too. It'd be extremely unusual for Tesla to go as far as changing the badge.

OTOH, a car dealer along the way might do that if they noticed the discrepancy between the badge and what the software reported. It'd be hard to blame them too, since people do sometimes downgrade the badging on cars (eg, this "218i", lol: https://carsandbids.com/auctions/Kmm4AgbK/2016-bmw-m2 ).

It still leaves Tesla as the bad guy. The current owner bears no relation to the ones who did it, and there's really no reasonable process that could have allowed him to know that this might happen.