Update: It was a "Reconditioned Offer", and Amazon offered me an exchange (against a new product).
I spoke to the IRIS Service, which graciously supplied a new serial number.
So I am happy with this purchase, the scanner works fine. Small, light, and especially practical for scanning pages on the fly or even small documents (I scanned my ID no problem). Character recognition (OCR) with ReadIRIS Pro 12 works wonders, especially for magazine pages.