Pathetic range of headset

Hello, I apparently made a dumb mistake recently by purchasing a
Motorola H500 headset on eBay for my wife's Razr V3c phone for about
half the cost of retail.

The problem is the range is about 6 inches before the headset starts
producing unacceptable static. I noticed these things were selling
like hotcakes, like one every 10 minutes, so maybe I'm just unlucky, or
there are a lot more people having this problem who aren't mentioning
the problem online. I even mailed the headset back and quickly
received an exchange, but the replacement does the same thing.

My question is, does anyone know of bad production batches of headsets
going out overseas and then making them back to the states??? I have
to ask because I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere....

Looks like these headsets are totally useless yet they are selling like
crazy on eBay. Has anyone else had this problem with range, and is
there any way to fix it like changing something on the phone?

This is my biggest question though -- since apparently this seller is
only selling a defective batch of items, does anyone know if the
manufacturer might exchange the headset directly???

I'm not dismissing the possibility of the phone being at fault but we
had tried a friend's headset about a month ago on it and it worked
great.