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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.
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.
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.
To the extent that they can they do. First they push really hard to force you to buy from authorized retailers. I'm not real thrilled with that but I understand it, secondly if you request the serial upfront you can find it's history. There's not much else they can do. If you insist on buying from a non-authorized retailer you're at
risk.
I recently bought a 4510R+E (about $50K with cards) that was claimed to be an overstock item from a non-authorized reseller. The serial was reportedly one shipped to China. That's fairly common for the fake Cisco, they obtain a real one and send back clones with that serial. Needless to say we didn't buy it.
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?
..for selling actual Cisco gear.
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?
Are you serious? When you had a problem with your "Cisco" equipment and called Cisco, do you think they'd help you out with your counterfeit gear?
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!
So your stance is that every single company on Earth must manufacture their own goods in secret. They cannot use a 3rd party factory, because the factory can just steal the plans and cut the designer out the equation. They cannot have a brand, because if they work hard to build consumer trust, some seedy knock-off company can just start using their name and logo. They cannot reveal their nifty new discoveries in a trade journal, as the ideas will just be stolen. If an employee leaves, they can take everything they ever designed with them, and never mind the fact that their salary was meant to be payment for those designs. Authors and musicians and movie makers and game makers have to beg for donations, since no one need pay them for their works.
Your ideas are so poorly thought out, it's almost childlike.
Intellectual property is a necessity for any modern economy. People could get by without such rules back when occupational choices were farmer, hunter, ditch-digger, and prostitute. But today's society is much improved, and those improvements require us to follow certain rules to maintain.
I think you mean "confidant" not cosmonaut
Reminds me of an old story about early mauals for Japanese goods. After many complaints, they finally supplied one with perfect english and spelling with the exception of the last words.
Plinted in english (:
The article mentions that they discovered lies on Zhao's citizenship application, and thus invalidated it.
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?
Your racist comment is belied by the fact that in THIS VERY SAME ARTICLE the presiding judge is presumably Chinese himself but sought to impose the maximum(?) penalty.
It could be that he is not Chinese (maybe Korean or another nationality) but with the name Gerald BRUCE Lee given to him by hopefully well meaning parents, I think it is more than likely he is of Chinese extraction.
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.
with the name Gerald BRUCE Lee given to him by hopefully well meaning parents
How well-meaning could they have been, really, to have named him "Gerald?" :)
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.
Cisco gear just isn't that competitive these days. High-performance applications are dominated by names like Mellanox and Chelsio. Cisco is trading on name recognition, but they're somewhere around best of the shit, or shittiest of the best at this point.
The issue boils down to "licensed or unlicensed copies."
We have seen stories about "counterfeit Cisco gear imported from China" in the past. Little is said about the likeliness that these were made in the same factories that make the licensed versions of the same. But I have seen examples of piracy (real piracy for-profit) where a CD/DVD duplicator company ran 'after hours operations' which produced more copies than were requested by the customer. Those copies, which were identical to the copies produced under license, were considered illegal and counterfeit.
To call them "fake" is not quite accurate enough to me as it implies it is not functional in some way which was not likely to be the case.
Plinted in english (:
Shouldn't that be "Plinted in Engrish"?
#DeleteChrome
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
The US was as bad or worse at the end of the 1800s. It's all part of a capitalist industrial revolution, we did the same, and rather than learning from history, we get all indignant. No wonder civilizations thousands of years older than ours hate us (and that's not in regards to the Chinese, who do not hate us, but the others who do).
Learn to love Alaska
"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.
There should be even harder sentences for those selling real Cisco gear.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Baloney.
It has been some years since most of the money made from "intellectual property" actually went to the people who created the innovation or idea. Today, almost ALL of the money made from intellectual property goes to someone who had absolutely nothing to do with creating it. That is a broken system.
I understand that it's very easy to believe that the way things are is the only way things can be, but it's simply not true.
And if we're going to keep this extra layer of bureaucracy that is weighing down world economies, we had better figure out a way to actually make it mean something besides an easy way to siphon wealth from the people who make to the people who own.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I thought you could.
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.
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!
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