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5 Years In Prison For Selling Fake Cisco Gear
angry tapir writes "A Virginia woman was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for leading a 'sophisticated' conspiracy to import and sell counterfeit Cisco Systems networking equipment. In addition to the prison time, Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia also ordered Chun-Yu Zhao, 43, of Chantilly, Virginia, to pay US$2.7 million restitution and a $17,500 fine."
Don't mess with Bruce Lee.
I'm wondering whether there was a deeper purpose to importing counterfeited equipment. If such could be successfully sold into government operations, it could then be used for backdoors if it had been outfitted with modified ICs designed to support that. That the importer was in Virginia normally would not be too important, but Virginia and Maryland being prime areas for government installations makes it more suspicious, if they were going to pose as a local supplier. Then, by cutting their price on bids below normal competitors, they could steer their equipment into specific departments.
I think they ought to open up some of those counterfeits, spend some money de-capping some chips, and take a good look at what's really in them.
When you consider what sort of information travels through networking equipment -- financial and government data, national security information, corporate secrets -- then it's not just a piece of hardware that was being counterfeited. Code on these devices can be extremely complex (I used to work for a firewall manufacturer) and it would be well within the capabilities of a small government to engineer a network device that could secretly send back information to a listening party.
She should be sentenced to 5 years of pulling cat6 cable thru 200 year old buildings in Boston; and removing all the old POTS wire.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
The irony is that nowadays folks legally sell the same equipment as "Cisco Compatible." She went to jail over a sticker.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you ever knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
You can get less jail time than that for manslaughter.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
Maybe not good enough, though. Who knows what sort of holes that gear may have left on networks, or what sort of issues it may introduce in a mission critical setting. To say nothing of the rampant financial shenanigans and who knows what sort of tax evasion and other little details. No, five years for that sort of ongoing, large-scale fraud isn't enough.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
All they did was take out one dealership it sounds like. Can only imagine the shitstorm that would occur if some US operation was caught manufacturing fake Huawei equipment. As China rises as a global power, at some point, more is going to have to be expected of them to act as a responsible global power, and stop looking the other way. There is a huge asymmetry between the economic might of a rising China, and the global responsibility one would expect the world's second largest economy to exhibit.
I understand all countries cheat, but to cheat in such a blatantly mickey mouse manner....and not get any sort of official governmental promise to "crack down" is disturbing....and likely indicative of a growing disconnect between Chinese business, and Chinese government.
You can take the person out of China... ...but you can't take the Chinese out of the person!
Are they sitting idly by, or are they assisting in any equipment standards and Q/A with what's being put to market?
I really have to wonder since, a decade ago, Cisco was THE NAME in networking gear. Every tech. shop I ran across had Cisco gear in their closet. What the hell happened to Management to allow this type of situation to creep into the tech. sector? Or did those Board members cash out of the game, giving their replacements a shop with the blood-stains hidden?
God bless the USA.
If Cisco wants to book their profits in Bermuda (to circumvent supporting the US justice system, among other things) then they should file their complaints against counterfeiters in Bermuda as well. I'm sick of these freeloaders. There's no legal team at the DOJ spending millions to defend my rights, that I can tell.
White-collar crimes like this are barely punished. Five years is a joke considering possible intelligence compromise from doctored gear.
Want to DETER white-collar criminals? Give them hard time in population where they must struggle to survive and cannot recover when they finally do get out. Destroy them as examples to others.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia [...] also stripped Zhao, from China, of her U.S. citizenship"
What the hell? I was unaware that there are different classes of citizenship. What if a person born as an American did this?
If the gear being sold was an accurate clone of Cisco gear, would you still consider it "fake"?
If you hear a bit-perfect copy of a piece of music, and it had been downloaded from TPB, would you consider that music "fake"? Would your experience of hearing it be "fake"?
I'm not saying the stuff that the guy who got convicted sold was a perfect clone of the Cisco gear, but if it were, what would be "fake" about it, and would it matter? Does it matter to the bits that flow through it?
We're probably closer to the ability to make perfect copies of physical objects than some care to admit. It's worth thinking about what that will mean to the way "fake" is being used here.
My guess is that most of the world wouldn't care if a perfect copy was fake. That's a problem for the minority of people who obtain wealth through "intellectual property". Because when you start having stronger and stronger laws against something that most people don't care about, you create a disconnect between law and society. Ultimately, that leads to either complete disregard of the law or outright tyranny in order to enforce it. And, as every single tyrant has found, tyrannies cannot last. Eventually, they're going to fall, and when they do, it's usually ugly.
You are welcome on my lawn.
..for selling actual Cisco gear.
The fake user manuals were written in flawless English.
What the hell? I was unaware that there are different classes of citizenship. What if a person born as an American did this?
You're given New Jersey residency and forced to live in Trenton.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Any one else missed this? Hiiiiyaaaaaaaaaaa! NGggggiiiiyaaaaaaaaoooooooooo!
The network by definition must be seen as insecure, if there are any unencrypted packets containing classified data on those networks we have a lot worse problems than back doors in routers
Yes for certain types of treason. But its rare as far as i know.
It is possible to strip a non native born citizen of their U.S. citizenship if their is evidence they obtained said citizenship through forgery or fraud. It is not possible to strip a native born U.S. citizen of their U.S. citizenship.
The article mentions that they discovered lies on Zhao's citizenship application, and thus invalidated it.
The article says she was convicted of obtaining her U.S. citizenship through fraud.
I'm wondering whether there was a deeper purpose to importing counterfeited equipment. If such could be successfully sold into government operations, it could then be used for backdoors...
Cisco gear is *made* in China. We're not dealing with pin-heads here, if they wanted to "backdoor" routers, they would at least attempt to "backdoor" the real things with Chinese operatives in Chinese factories where these routers are made, while on Chinese soil...
This, of course, is one of the great weaknesses of the shift of manufacturing away from US soil, we just don't make things anymore.
Not long down the road, all those Filipino maids in the rich palazzos, palaces, and chateaus will be replaced with American maids.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If can be invalidated if fraud was committed on the citizenship application.
FTA: "Zhao also fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship based on lies on her citizenship application, the agency said."
... I mean, being named Gerald BRUCE Lee by his parents must have exposed him to quite a bit of mocking as a kid!
Oh, well maybe it toughened him up (isn't that the premise of the song "A boy named Sue"?). Anyway, as a judge maybe he can take it out on some of his former tormentors!
By the way, I'm Asian-American (if you haven't guessed by my slashdot name).
If they committed some sort of fraud in the context of obtaining their citizenship, that can be grounds to reverse it.
It would be analogous to somebody claiming to be a citizen by birth; but being discovered to have been born elsewhere.
a lot of people would probably be telling a "white lie" here and there, on those forms. I have no experience with this, but it's most likely easier to get into heaven than it is to get into the USA, if you answer the questions honestly.
Without knowing what fraudulent answers she gave, it's not unthinkable that they just revoked her citizenship because she lied about getting a ticket for jaywalking before she entered the USA, or something trivial like that.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Selling Linksys ? They are owned by Cisco...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/17/cybersecurity-china-idUSN1615357620101117
Remember that story?
This one has something to do with it I'm sure.
She's being put in jail for a bunch of stuff all of which revolves around fraud. She was misrepresenting her product to customers which to be honest is something most big corps do these days and the majority of it results in civil, not criminal charges. BTW Copyright violations are a civil matter and should stay civil so don't drag that into this as well.
What? Am I the only one?
She was stripped of her citizenship because she lied on her immigration application, not because she committed a crime.
Does the fake gear also have fake bugs?
If so, does that mean it works better than non-fake gear?
The very fact that I see a Chinese name in the summary is enough for me to go "Counterfeit", who cares the reason why. They have connections.
Spend an evening on eBay, you'll find the same pattern... Chinese name, counterfeit items.
There's more here than meets the eye.
One of the charges was"obtaining citizenship by fraud". 8 CFR PART 340 allows USCIS to "reopen a naturalization proceeding and revoke naturalization" within 2 years of granting citizenship, if there's reason to believe the application was based on fraudulent information. Under this process, the woman can be "administratively denaturalized", but only after a full course of hearings and other due process.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts this was part of some bigger deal involving Washington and Beijing. The woman doesn't want to go to Federal prison for 20+ years, Washington doesn't want a diplomatic brouhaha involving a Chinese-born citizen, and Beijing doesn't want to lose face (again). This was a back-door option that worked for everyone.
After reading this article, some comments and a bit of research on Google I wouldn't be surprised if I unknowingly bought and sold fake Cisco at my last place of work (who have since gone under).
It was the only job I've had that involved dealing with "The Channel", despite working in both sales then purchasing there I'm still not too clued up about that side of things (it's boring, as you don't get to play with the things you buy) and I'm still quite niave about what goes on.
We were a Cisco Select partner who frequently got invited along to our local Cisco offices as they were trying to push us more and more towards Cisco SMB stuff, our customers included local police, local government, schools, colleges and installers. We had accounts with Ingram Micro, Azlan/Computer 2000, Micro P, but we very rarely bought Cisco from them. We usually ended up buying "grey market" stock from brokers which was often cheap enough for us to add our mark up and still undercut the distributors, but the thing I'm really wondering about is the dirt cheap "OEM" GBICs and SFPs we used to buy which we'd normally put at least a 300% mark up on and still be cheap, these were one of the few things that weren't stock dependant, our supplier for them always had a good stock of them and they were always dirt cheap so we always had a reasonable stock of them.
At the time I never thought about the possibility that anything we sold was counterfeit, but looking back I suspect at the very least the GBICs and SFPs were, none of our customers openly questioned why a small company was being able to undercut the likes of Ingram Micro, with some of our closer customers it was a case of "yeah, it's grey stock, but we pass the savings on to YOU", but most of it was don't ask don't tell.
We were just a small business wanting to play with the big boys, we'd get pricing support from Cisco for big jobs, but we'd tend to take their quotation, remove the prices, send it to the brokers and say "see what you can do" and they'd pretty much always undercut Cisco so for a struggling company who might go under anyway the gamble of buying "grey stock" that could possibly end up being counterfeit will generally pay off.
Well if you'd bothered Googling him you would see he doesn't exactly look Chinese http://www.wcl.american.edu/alumni/dac/lee.cfm
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
they pulled the sales equivalent of a man in the middle attack.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
A lot of Cisco gear is made in China and assembled in Mexico... This gear could be 100% Cisco compatible using the exact same design and specified components. The only difference between this gear and official Cisco equipment may have just been the S/N and hologram sticker.
You can take a simple $20 flash chip and put Cisco's logo on it, and get $2000. It's the same chip, just authorized & branded by Cisco.
Property rights have gotten a bit twisted. Musicians often do not get paid when their works are played over the air. The middle men get paid but not the artists. Worse yet the rights extend to absurd periods of time. It is one thing to have an exclusive right to a song for one or two years but now it goes on for lifetimes. In building mechanical products one must constantly be certain to avoid stepping on anyone's patents. It can cause enough complexity to ruin a decent product or make it so expensive that it is not manufactured at all. In the case of software the notion of property rights has allowed all kinds of nonsense law suits to crush small companies who had not violated at all. It is the expense of the legal process and defense that forces the small guy to sell his product to the attacking company. The entire concept of intellectual property needs a complete rework. And in my state the punishments need to be looked at as well. We have many retired folks in Florida and the state went crazy in protecting them from con artists. A bit of fraud can get you charged with greater penalties than a murder. A 175 year sentence for fraud may require the entire sentence to be served whereas a murderer can often be out in 25 years.
Does Huawei have some special agreement with cisco, then?
I remember working underneath them, wondering about who they were and what they do (talking about 5 years ago in Belgium, as they had their workforce almost double each week in a small office with people working day and night.)
The only reply I got from colleagues was "They take cisco hardware and repackage it, they even don't bother to update the references to Cisco in their software."
As a upside; they couldn't drive. They would hit all our lease-cars. So colleagues would "strategically place" their cars in order to get insurance replace little own mistakes on their costs.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
"Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia [...] also stripped Zhao, from China, of her U.S. citizenship"
What the hell? I was unaware that there are different classes of citizenship. What if a person born as an American did this?
There aren't. She was convicted of "obtaining citizenship by fraud," which always results in loss of citizenship. Or put another way, if you obtain it by fraud then legally you never had it in the first place, an imaginary person did.
... said "Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them." He then destroyed a stack of the defendant's counterfeit equipment with a single chop.
There should be even harder sentences for those selling real Cisco gear.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Sounds like one of the red commie bastards !! Hang the horse thief !!
I thought you could.
I believe that would be covered by the "cruel and unusual punishment" idea.
If you get caught selling fake cisco equipment you're not going to white collar resort prison. You're going to federal pound me in the ass prison. http://youtu.be/xPcql4FuCK0
The path to counterfeit routers might involve surplus or QA-reject circuit boards, populated with surplus or QA-reject parts, assembled by low-cost electronics workers from the toy industry. The Chinese are unlikely to throw away ANYTHING that can be assembled into a marketable product. My guess is the cheap/counterfeit routers were supposed to end up on the domestic Chinese market, but somebody discovered they could get more for them in the US.
If the goal was espionage, it would make more sense to retrofit the REAL product so there would be no quality issues. Since any communications worth stealing would probably be encrypted before it hits the router, I think they could get a lot more mileage out of spyware on PCs and laptops.
" According to the Wiki [wikipedia.org] the copy they made of the sidewinder was so perfect you could mix and match parts and it would work perfectly.:"
My friend, that's nothing. In WW2 a B-29 on a mission over Japan made an emergency landing in the USSR. At the time, Japan and the USSR were not at war so the plane had to be interred. The USSR didn't have a good long range bomber so Stalin ordered the airplane designers to duplicate the B-29 EXACTLY. The duplication was so exact that even patched up battle damage was duplicated! Apparently, nobody wanted to alter Stalin's orders in the least.
So you're saying these Crisco routers might be fakes? How is one to know? When I loaded the SIO everything looked fine. I got the normal & prompt, typed in en, got to the @ prompt, and starting inputting config.
OPSF works fine, EYGRT is running, and PGB is passing routes like a champ!
"Lee also stripped Zhao, from China, of her U.S. citizenship and ordered her to forfeit four homes in Maryland and northern Virginia, three condominiums in Chantilly, a Porsche Boxster, a Porsche Cayenne, a Mercedes sedan and seven bank accounts containing more than $1.6 million." Daaayauuum! She was doing pretty damn well if you ask me. Or anyone. Who would really care that they weren't getting 100% genuine Cisco equipment (except for maybe Cisco)?
"Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia [...] also stripped Zhao, from China, of her U.S. citizenship"
What the hell? I was unaware that there are different classes of citizenship. What if a person born as an American did this?
Then they go to jail longer. The far right wants to tell you that the country is being given away to illegal immigrants when, in fact, US Immigration policies are a lot tougher than they are aware of. In extraordinary cases, even when there are no lies on the citizenship application, the federal government can legally take away a naturalized citizen's citizenship. This is usually reserved for hard core felony convictions (murder, rape, child molestation, drug dealing at the wholesale level, human smuggling, etc, etc) but it can happen. Usually what happens is after the sentence is served, the individual is then deported back to their home country.
One of my favs is the 1st successful US cruise missile, still firmly WW2; it was the V-1, reverse-engineered from bits and pieces (also gathered from early tests in Pomerania, and IIRC even some plans). Strangely absent from popcultural conciousness... what, because the US did the copying? ;p
Jerrycans history is perhaps the greatest of all. Or maybe the Soviet RPG-7, reverse engineered, made in & used by US forces now? Or maybe Katyusha, copied by Waffen-SS?
The F117 (US stealth tech in general) also inspired by and building on some Soviet breakthroughs.
One can also get designers outright (Sikorsky? Von Braun team?); defections were in all directions
And we can't forget the greatest game of all time, Tetris (even if that's a bit outside og the scope here)
Generally, not doing it would be just stupid. If there's a successful base design out there, you take and improve from it; trying and aiming to trace the already completed necessary intermediate steps would be foolish. Nobody did it when revving up their tech industries, aiming for a status of industrial powerhouse.
One that hath name thou can not otter