Fakes, Coming to a Store Near You

fishdan writes to tell us that while most Slashdotters have their own trusted sources for gear there is a growing concern that all consumers should look out for. According to PC World, more and more counterfeit hardware is coming to market each year. From the article: '...batteries aren't the only tech item that counterfeiters love. In October 2004, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in Anchorage, Alaska, seized 20,000 suspected fake Memorex USB memory key thumb drives from Asia. And last year, Miami officials seized 900 allegedly phony laptops valued at $700,000. "Maybe it's a laptop, an MP3 player, or a component like a DVD drive--anything in the digital world can be counterfeited," says Therese Randazzo, a U.S. Customs Service counterfeiting expert.'"

Comments

Re:I don't get it

[Big Nothing]

"What is wrong with counterfeit electronics? Do they have different functionality, are they shabbily built, or do they just take profits away from the rightful owners of the product?"

From TFA:
Bogus cell phone batteries, shoddily made and potentially unsafe, are a specialty of counterfeiters. "It's one thing to buy a fake $30 Louis Vuitton bag on Canal Street in New York City. It's an entirely different matter when you buy a fake cell phone battery and it blows up"

So yes, lack of quality IS a problem - it's not just IP whine.

Cisco is plagued by counterfeits

[puzzled]

  A Cisco dual channel T1 controller, part VWIC-2MFT-T1 is $2,000 new list price. A small reseller will pay 70% of list or about $1,400 for it in distribution, while a large reseller might only pay $1,100 or so. Below we see a tinyurl link to an Ebay auction for a new boxed unit at only $227 or 11.3% of list price. I guarantee if you contact the seller you can get six dozen of them for the same price.

http://tinyurl.com/ak9by

  This has gone on and on and on and on for the last two years, destroying the value of used Cisco gear we pull from customers and making it almost impossible to buy a used/refurbished card without running into this stuff.

  I found out about this sort of thing the hard way. I got a *fantastic* deal on six new in the box Cisco 1721 routers. It wasn't so fantastic when I had to explain to my biggest customer that half of the machines they owned couldn't be registered for service because Cisco had them listed as in service in South America. Oh, and they failed, one by one, with mysterious problems not attributeable to hardware or software ... they just acted ... different.

  Foo on all counterfeiters. They should be given counterfeit lifesaving drugs while riding in an ambulance equipped with counterfeit brake pads on their way to a hospital where they'll be cared for by a doctor who is really a drunken paramedic who thought it'd be fun to be a trauma surgeon for a day. If they live through that then they should be placed in a real live jail and periodically offered counterfeit parole papers to sign.