Agree. Whoever "rebadged" committed fraud, especially if he claimed it as a 90 when he sold it. I don't see where Tesla did anything wrong.
Tesla is the one that made it a 90 to start with.
They replaced the 60 battery, under warranty, with a 90 battery
and set the config to be a 90
Otherwise it wouldn't have had 90 range. That requires Tesla to do it. Tesla COULD HAVE software locked it to 60 anyway- but did not.
And as mentioned there were many reports back when this was happening that Tesla also would rebadge the car to say 90 externally too.
Now, THAT isn't wrong- in fact it's awesome- Tesla didn't have stock on an old warranty part, so they gave the customer a free upgrade. He now owned a 90- per Tesla.
The problem came years later when that information wasn't properly annotated internally and they did an MCU upgrade and the tech involved- lacking the original info- changed the config back to 60. Despite the car when it came in: having a 90 badge, a 90 battery, and a tesla-installed 90 config file.
Then it was compounded by Tesla being unwilling to look at the history of what actually happened and telling the customer it'd be $4500 cash to get back what he originally had.
Until Hughes got enough bad press out there to force them to do so.
It's an unforced, bad-press causing, error by Tesla service.
This is not an isolated incident either.
Teslas habit of changing car configs without proper internal notations, and then "auditing" out those changes some day in the future and refusing to consider they made a mistake somewhere, has been an ongoing problem (most often in cars Tesla sends to auction and removes FSD on the back end- but doesn't immediately update the car) that has made splashy headlines many times.
As the fleet gets larger, and esp. the used changed-hands-more-than-once fleet, you'll only see more of such.
This stuff is
easy to fix with decent internal IT system controls, but Tesla has not made much effort in this direction in years.
(and it wouldn't take much of an effort to make these issues impossible)