I own an export factory in Shenzhen and we buy acceptable quality kn95 masks for our staff PPE in low volumes of a few hundred or so masks per order, for 10-11 RMB each, ~$1.6 USD/mask. While there is a variance in quality standards depending on the manufacturer source, I think labeling anything cheaper than this $1.50ish as “fakes” is kind of not the full story in this PPE case. See, in China, instead of political parties posturing to give Five Trillion Dollars in stimulus funds away without much to show for it (like we didn’t even get a single new mask factory in America for this?) instead the “CHI-NA” Government did the smart thing by mobilizing manufacturers directly to make PPE, with terrific financing terms for equipment purchases and promises to buy whatever quantity of PPE stock was made, for any manufacturers that wanted to switch over to make PPE. We even considered taking this factory stimulus incentives ourselves to get into making PPE, but I ultimately decided against it because it was too hard to get workers and we had existing orders to work on with our staff. But many factories that didn’t previously make PPE got into it. Masks from those kind of factories are not maliciously “fakes” but the quality is more highly variable.
What you describe should be termed “substandard” with regards to testing standards, not “fake”. As an example, fake would be further labeling the mask with a 3M logo.
From my perspective as a person who's career has been in manufacturing, from the factory floor to supply chain consultant to factory owner who lived in China for 10-years, there is a distinct difference between definitions here of substandard quality and fake. If some company is trying to sell a non-3M designed and manufactured mask as a real 3M mask, that's the definition of "fake". If a company has poor manufacturing practices but is using materials which would otherwise be acceptable industry materials to make a mask to KN95 standards, but for some reason, a random sample of the lot is proven to be "Substandard" to the KN95 standards, that is the definition of "substandard".
A mask labeled as N95 that knowingly doesn't stop 95% of particles is a fake N95 mask. It is a real mask, it's a fake N95.
There's a big distinction between "we had a manufacturing error" sort of scenarios and folks who knowingly produce stuff that doesn't meet the standards (or don't bother to check).
