How do the Chinese get a hold of these?

[BiNiaRiS]

I was just cruising Taobao and I found this keyboard:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=5661137153

I recognized a few of the keycaps because I found 2 of these boards at a local recycling place. There's another seller that has done the same thing with these boards.

Originally these boards had a ton of custom keycaps. All the F keys, as well as the cluster above the numpad and even the arrow keys were all custom pad printed caps for what looked like a bank to me. You can tell that some of them are still there...the numpad caps are all worn down and the enter and tab keys are a different font.

The keyboards has some very cool caps orignally as well..there was a Purple cap that says calculator. I had one of these and I sold it to Ascaii. The ALT and CTRL keys were green and blue (shift keys were normal). Someone obviously has removed most of the custom caps and replaced them with lasered one...and it looks terrible.

The question is how do these boards make it to China? Recyclers just sell it in bulk or something? If you look closely, there is a tag on the back that says these came from Spokane, Washington...same place mine came from.

[kaiserreich]

Yes, via recycling.
The chinese called them 'Western Trash' , which is a literal translation from 洋垃圾。The people at chinese forums call them YLJ keyboards. YLJ is the chinese pronunciation and an acronym for 'Yang La Ji'.

The keyboard you found is just the tip of the iceberg, they have tons and tons of stuff all brought into china as trash.