And there in lies the solution, they should have either run a limited quantity to ensure that what would come off the production line will work or had somebody out there to test one. If they'd done this, they would have spotted that there was a problem with 10,000 of them before they committed. If they subsequently received the production batch and they didn't work, then they could go back to the factory and point fingers.

I'm with Hugo and Peter, this is a situation that has been caused by Raspberry Pi not checking that their production build will function correctly, the way they've done this can either be put down to inexperience or lunacy.

This is part of the reason that we have our our pick and place setup, we can assure quality, our PCB's are bare board tested for connectivity.

This reminds me of us recently purchasing some 7 segment drivers for a product that we build for another company, we ordered them from china, they arrived with the correct part number on the devices. We put one on a production board and low and behold it didn't work, the numbers were coming out all wrong. Turns out the chinese manufacturer of this device had copied the (long out of production) original part but had labelled the standard inputs part with the BCD part variants.

Baring in mind that this was a large through hole device, we would have been in a whole heap of doo-doo if we'd just blindly trusted what the parts were and had them soldered into production devices.

Bottom line is, never trust any electronic component that is sourced from china, chances are it's not what you think it is.