First of all, I don't think there are few units, I'm seeing a lot of solid and translucent figures being sold. The problem here is that the second resellers (ebay) are making more than 100-200% profit on their purchase price. Let's give an example with the prices that I have found:
Provider: sell to 15-20USD to their local resellers. Dont know how much the profit here is ...
1st reseller (local sellers): buy from the provider at 15-20USD and sell to 25-30USD to local and international users.
2nd reseller (international sellers): buy from the local resellers at 25-30USD and sell to 100USD to the users all over the world.
This is the problem, the 2nd resellers are increasing their profit more than 100-200% and the final users are thinking that these pieces are prototypes or rare minifigs due are too expensive, but in fact, the figures are not too expensive in themselves, well, are expensive to be clones, if they really are....