Is buying evaluation or demo units from manufacturers for personal use considered fraud?
No. Manufacturers often offer resellers special programs to buy their hardware or software at below retail cost so that resellers can be better educated on the products. If the reseller knows a particular brand of product better, chances are good that the reseller would in turn recommend them when making a sale. However, this is not to say that all legitimate resellers buy evaluation or demo units for the sole purpose of being better educated on them. A lot of resellers buy evaluation or demo units for themselves just because they are good deals. Nonetheless, any end-user who takes the effort to get a resale license and open accounts with distributors is probably not the average consumer. More often than not, users who go through this effort are opinion leaders amongst their group of friends or family. Thus, it can be argued that the better educated these users are on a product, the more likely they will recommend it to their friends and people they know. In that sense, they are not mu
