Amazon basics is so hit or miss anyway. I bought a bunch of their rechargable batteries, but it's hard to discern the quality of invisible specifications.

I kind of wonder if they suck, because some physical amazonbasics things I've bought were actually not great.

Seems unlikely -- Amazon Basics already have razor-thin margins, I struggle to see the motivation of someone counterfeiting such a budget brand.

Counterfeit meaning not the product they actually paid for.

For example, an RTX 3050 probably had thing margins when it came out (or some equivalent GPU with low margins).

But! You can still counterfeit it and put in a GT 430 and have the same shroud - and people do just that.

Amazon HDMI cables are cheap, I’m sure, but an older spec HDMI cable with no HDCP is probably even cheaper. And you can’t really tell the difference… until everything is streaming at 480p.

How did they know it was counterfeit?

Once you took a hard look at it you could tell that the injection molding was pretty low quality.

I also tested it. The cable was faulty and wasn't the HDMI standard we ordered.

Both are pretty good indicators that it's a counterfeit product.

Amazon co-mingles all their goods. So the likelihood of counterfeits, even in amazon basics products, is high.