Chinese designers DO NOT buy components from Chinese Ebay, because most of the time, Chinese designers want their products to work! They also want their products to be cheap, and Ebay counterfeits are ridiculously expensive.
so where the "chinese ebay" get their supply from?
From con artists specialized in making fake parts? You know, the thing called 'crime' exists in this world, and shouldn't be surprising that it works professionally. There are factories doing fake parts, just as there are factories doing fake clothing.
Sometimes these can be originally genuine parts, but different parts (for example, a cheaper FET with lower specs), or parts that have failed production testing (binned to trash can), and the conning is just a relabeling operation.
Sometimes they are deliberate products designed from scratch, only to be a slightly different kind - a type that can be manufactured with much lower cost, and then sold at premium prices.
You know, Ebay is not a store itself, it's just a market place.
You can sell stuff there, I have sold stuff there. So anyone can do it, and so can any scammer.
A lot of Chinese design is actually just fine, and designed properly, using proper component sources. Components are cheap! In many designs, the human work is the most expensive part, even when done in countries with lowest wages.
Even the Chinese designers designing low-quality products must have their own sources of low-quality components - even they want to know
something about the component. They may accept a counterfeit, but it must work at some level. And they want it much cheaper than the genuine part (which already is rather cheap). Ebay counterfeits are bloody expensive! That's also part of the scam; people have their doubts about cheap components, so they sell at high enough prices so that they
could be real.
I don't know about Malesian distributors. Is there, by any chance, any redistributor who takes orders from small players and then orders from Farnell/Element14/Digikey/etc. daily or weekly or so? We have one company locally here specialized in just that, and I'm doing similar service to my friends every since and then here at a local club.