You sure this was a scam from a Swedish company, and not a spot-market batch that had been jumping between too many companies?

Sweden has too strong laws against pirated products and general scams for anyone wanting to operate such a scam from Sweden. Anyone caught with rebranding products may face very stiff charges so such a stupidity would probably be limited to a one-man operation, where the person may hope that he/she can't be tracked down. But a one-man operation would normally not have access to the equipment to produce the components unless it is someone who works at a larger company and is busy with a bit of extra - night-time - activities. Then, it would probably be a lot easier to just produce empty solder blanks than to bother getting access to any dead silicon.

But since stolen, untested or false components are circling around on the spot market, it sounds more like something that may happen if you buy from a company that buys and resell spot market batches. When in need of spot-market components, we normally make use of companies that tests a random sampling of the chips. The cost is a bit higher, but having a 500-batch of units failing the factory test - or reach the customer and then fail - is way more expensive.