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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."
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
..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?
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.
You're assuming Cisco is the only victim? What about the buyers? If this equipment is sub-par and goes into mission critical projects, people might die. This was in Virginia, and if the equipment is sold to a government entity and it has back-doors, secrets might be lost and people might die.
Five years seems very reasonable to me.
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.
Cisco is being protected, yes. But so is the market, from fraudulant participants selling fake goods.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.