Faking a Company

gambit3 writes "What happens when pirating a movie, an application, or a game is not enough for you? Well, you take the next step and pirate a whole company. It happened to Japanese electronics giant NEC. Counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan."

Comments

The IHT Goole AD says it all

[arivanov]

Well... The ad on the article says it all:

• 
  Product Sourcing
  Buy Risk Free From China IVELL - Global product sourcing
  www.ivell.com

and

• 
  Quality Manufacturing
  Plastic, electronics and metal UK Management, Chinese Factory
  www.motiontouch.com

More Questions anyone?

Re:This happens all the time...

[absent_speaker]

Not quite. While Oakleys, Rolexis and other knock-offs have been manufactured for a while, this is a whole different ball game. These individuals actually lease property, negociate with suppliers and establish sales relationships in the name of NEC. They do all this under the flag of the firm's proper brand name, not some mispelling. Those are two very different scenarios. It's kind of a neat scam. It will probably inspire con-artists everywhere to try something similar. I could just imagine someone faking Hilton. They could order a large quantity of samples from a few suppliers - and pay upfront for the samples to build trust. The scammer later says they love the product and then order 5 cargo containers from each supplier on 30 days credit terms with a forged letter of credit. And then Bam! They disappear with a few million in goods to never appear again.

I suspect this is extremely common

[bobamu]

I was looking at a chinese electronics manufacturers page some time ago, and they had a bulletin board.

One of the posts effectively consisted of "Can you make me some tv's branded panasonic and send them to north africa"

Tip of the iceberg, perhaps.

Neat!

[mano_k]

And I thought the guys who claimed to work for the railway company and started removing the rails of an abandoned line not far from where I livedhad been something!

The hired local companies for transport and even distributed leaflets to the people in the neighbarhood informing them of the upcomming works! They made some money from the scrap iron before anybody noticed!

MP3 Players, too

[Killshot]

An aquaintance recently went to China to visit a factory that makes the sony bean mp3 players. They told him they could make the players for him and just leave the sony logo off it. He then plans to sell them on ebay.

I tried to explain how bad an idea this was and how there are so many other legal ways to invest your money, but he wouldnt hear it.

Cisco suffers a great deal from this

[puzzled]

    A WIC-1DSU-T1-V2 is $1,000 list, $700 or so to a small reseller in distribution, and $400 for a clean used unit from a reliable aftermarket dealer. Go look for that part number on Ebay and check out how new boxed product is 15% of list price ... this stuff is everywhere and it basically drove me out of the Cisco aftermarket.