PinePhone? Yes Sir! We have Those…

[ryo]

 ... And I too, am not sure about foreign countries (I'm guessing you are based in Japan ...forgive me if I got that wrong), but over here in the UK we are used to being lied to by retailers, service providers, politicians... well, pretty much everyone really... just so long as they get your money.  They'll promise you the world... but once you've signed on the dotted line, you'll more often than not find they sold you a dude and you then have to spend weeks chasing them for what they promised you or your money back.

Yes, I'm both from and in Japan.
Politicians are those that usually lie to us, but that's the norm in every country anyway.
Other than that, people aren't really liars here, I'd rather say they pretend to know everything about the field they're working in, even if it's clear as day they don't.

A relevant example was when I took my PinePhone to the local SoftBank store because SoftBank USIM didn't work with it, they had no idea where in the settings they had to be, and were especially lost as soon as they went into the "Mobile" settings, but that's because that's in English (so not translated to Japanese yet).
I don't live in Tokyo, so most people here don't know any English apart from "hello", "sorry", and "no English", but despite looking nothing like iOS nor Android, he thought for 2 hours long the phone was running Android, despite already explaining it's Linux, but after that he finally understood.
But after a grand total of 3 hours, he gave up and called the headquarters, and they confirmed that they only support Android and iOS (and flip phones, but those run on a stripped down Android base anyway).
Then he suggested a free SIM so it can be used on every device regardless of OS or IMEI (they lock USIM cards to specific IMEI on top of supporting specific OSs), so he called the HQ again, and they told him that free SIMs are data only, which he genuinely didn't even know.