Given the kinds of returns that Fry's would accept, I wouldn't be surprised if those were returns they had accepted that way. The one near me would attempt to resell laptop power bricks that had been returned with no AC power cord, and one time I got "new" RAM sticks that turned out to be actually used and so busted that a quarter of the data bus lines were inoperative.
I remember buying a Radeon at Fry's (Fountain Valley, Roman Empire), going home, opening it up and... it was something else, a cheap VGA card. They gave me a hard time about taking it back too, 16-year old me didn't know how to cut through the BS so my dad had to go back with me on a 3rd trip and get it sorted out. What a place.
That was my local Fry's and I wouldn't touch any returned item with a 10-foot pole given the stories I heard about them, despite them being on discount. This was back in the late 90s before social media, so it must of been word of mouth through my high school friends.
I had the impression that their return process was very lax so you'd have "customers" returning broken items or worse... And they'd end up on the shelves with the white "returned item" sticker with the discounted price.
And the discount was never even big enough for me to even consider taking that risk for a moment! $395 new, but then returned and restocked with that sticker and only marked down to $390? Nah. I always wondered who was actually dumb enough to fall for that.
Only time I ever considered it was when the returned one was the only one left.
That happened to me at a CompUSA, opened up box for what was supposed to be wireless keyboard and found newspapers instead. It helped that I had just been there with my dad 5 minutes ago and the newspapers were from a town 40 miles away.
They have to be suspicious because customer fraud is as much of a problem as employee fraud, but it still sucks to be accused as the victim.
