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Man Pleads Guilty To Selling Fake Chips To US Navy
itwbennett writes "Neil Felahy of Newport Coast, California, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and counterfeit-goods trafficking for his role in a chip-counterfeiting scam. Felahy, along with his wife and her brother, operated several microchip brokerage companies under a variety of names, including MVP Micro, Red Hat Distributors, Force-One Electronics and Pentagon Components. 'They would buy counterfeit chips from China or else take legitimate chips, sand off the brand markings and melt the plastic casings with acid to make them appear to be of higher quality or a different brand,' the US Department of Justice said in a press release. The chips were then sold to Naval Sea Systems Command, the Washington, DC group responsible for maintaining the US Navy's ships and systems, as well as to an unnamed vacuum-cleaner manufacturer in the Midwest."
I'm imagining someone selling the Navy fake ships.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
The chips were then sold to Naval Sea Systems Command, the Washington, D.C., group responsible for maintaining the US Navy's ships and systems, as well as an unnamed vacuum-cleaner manufacturer in the Midwest.
Has our Navy gone from suck to blow?
You can get away with fraud when dealing with the government. It's the Vacuum company that got them in trouble. The government would have probably went on for a few more years buying them if it wasn't for these people getting greedy and going after the lucrative vacuum market.
-EL
whats wrong with sony, samsung, or intel. I'm sure they could produce chips for government related applications, not some shady business no ones heard of before.
Are you familiar with efforts to foster American small businesses in the United States by the government (note this is nothing specific to Obama)? If you want to get into government contracts, I suggest you start a small business owned by a woman who is a minority. You'd be amazed at how easily you can land contracts and subcontracts as the government and big contractors strive to make quotas.
My work here is dung.
HOW does a man and his family sell ANYTHING to the Navy? Is the Navy getting their parts from eBay or Craig's List?
Government procurement is a bureaucratic mess, and a royal pain in the ass for both buyers and sellers. Because of this (and because of rules preferring "small" and "minority-owned" businesses), it is very common for government entities to buy though a middle man that knows how their procurement systems work, rather than getting product directly from a manufacturer, especially for low-cost COTS products.
apparently the fake chips are made with less than 50% potato, have a weird taste and are sold in a can.
Selling fake/incorrect components should be prosecuted as sabotage, because defective components can degrade vital systems and cause casualties.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Fuck the Navy, you mean my vacuum cleaner might have sub-standard chips in it?! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!
Are you a vacuum cleaner overclocker as well? Oh man, I thought I was the only one! I'm going to go home right this moment and make sure my Nortech N552BC-NED Dual Venturi 55G doesn't have these chips on it! And after all the time I spent adding that extra fine filtration with carbon and pin striping to it... Damnit all...
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
What about that guy that sold them the fake "Mission Accomplished" banner for their aircraft carrier?
The problem is that the chips will work, but they won't work as well.
Let's look at two amplifiers, a 741 and a 5534. They are both pin-compatible op-amps that do the same job. The LM is $0.56 ($0.13 in bulk) and the 5534 is $1.73 ($0.80 in bulk). The 5534 is a high-performance, low-noise amplifier.
Now, these are both CONSUMER grade chips and two that I just happened to know off the top of my head. Frankly, chips don't get much cheaper than that but you can already see a large price discrepancy. ($670 per 1000 chips.)
Performance under ideal conditions isn't the biggest issue here. They aren't subject to the military or aerospace standards for robustness. Hell, they're probably not even "industrial" grade. Will they withstand a 200G shock? How about extreme temperatures or humidity? Are these chips RoHS or not and marked differently?
Systems using these fraudulent chips would be plagued by problems and would cause the vendors, contractors, and the Navy a huge amount of anguish. It puts people at risk, and the motherfucker should be tried for sedition.
I have to ask, "why bother"? It's not like they wouldn't be making tons of cash from the contract in the first place.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
In 2006-2007 it was a problem to get many parts in the reasonable quality - flash, op-amps, multiplexors.
So we bought a few reels from the second-hand distributor.
As a result flash marked as 32Mb was 2Mb inside, op-amps weren't up to the specs (manufacturer confirm that they were made of written-off dyes), multiplexors were sold as a particular brand with advanced features while indeed were jelly beans for $0.10 a piece.
Thankfully we were able to rework boards before products hit the consumer market.
That was a good lesson for us to never use Chinese distributors for parts