IME[1] professionally refurbished ex corporate HP or Lenovo gear is very useable. However you need to aim for a minimum spec of i5 CPU, say a
4200 or better, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD. That will run Win 10 and any common office applications workload nicely. You can normally pick that up for under ~£300 [1] and I buy a fair amount of it, most recent was "HP EliteBook 840 G3 14 inches HD Ultrabook Core i5 6200U up to 2.8GHz, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Wireless 11ac & Bluetooth 4.2, Windows 10 Pro" for £310. That is a high end "road warrior" class machine that would have been £900 or more when new.You are almost certainly confusing coincidence with causation. Everybody gets loads of calls from scammers pretending to be MS/Amazon/Visa etc.
Yup some are quite decent and generally pretty usable once you get used to the foibles. Great if you can exist in the google ecosystem of apps as well. Slightly more tricky when you need to get it into Linux mode to install a wider selection of apps (e.g. Thunderbird)
I bought one since a number of customer's were getting them, and it seemed a quick way to get familiar enough with them to support them.
It already is in a limited sense - but it targets a different market segment. Great if you go into it knowing what you are buying, but has come as a bit of shock to many who thought they were getting a great deal on a laptop, but did not appreciate all laptops are not the same.
(Much the same can also be said for those that pick up "bargain" win 10 machines for £200 in a supermarket - those are pretty much unusable)