Florida man (not that one) sold $100M-plus in counterfeit network gear A 39-year-old Florida man pleaded guilty Tuesday to selling hundreds of millions of dollars of counterfeit Cisco gear to unsuspecting schools, hospitals, government agencies, and the military. According to the US Justice Department, between 2013 and 2022 Onur Aksoy, based in Miami, founded at least 19 companies in New Jersey …
Looks like we can do both now, on one platform at least. Haven’t been bothered to see if this is a general release across all hardware platforms or not. Could be hardware/ASIC dependant.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/ncs4200/configuration/guide/ce/17-1-1/b-layer-2-xe-17-1-1-ncs4200/m_lan_macsec_mka_support.html
HTH
Thanks, but as you say it’s extremely hardware dependant, combined with software maturity. We have support for both on ONE of the four models we’re deploying; partial support (i.e. support for both on a limited number of ports) is supposedly coming on one or two of the others in later versions of IOS-XR. If they can get all the bugs worked out, that is.
You missed the "and pay restitution to his customers". That has several possible levels of bad: refunds (or supply genuine Cisco equipment) and pay for losses caused by the stuff he did supply. The obvious dodge is to declare bankruptcy to zero out the debt and move on. That means parting with 100% of the money he says he still has. If he has stashed some away and the law finds any of it then his plea bargain agreement is null and void. The money gets taken and he gets sentenced fully for everything he admitted to plus anything else the US Justice Department can prove.
Lying on a plea bargain agreement to keep some of your stash means completing the custodial sentence then fleeing to a non-extradition country - that will probably detain you until you hand over most of your stash. There are more realistic plans, like living it up until you get caught then honestly handing everything over in the bankruptcy. Afterwards you cannot be a director of a company but you can restart the business with some new names and some forged documents. You could try emigrating before the law knows for sure you are guilty. You may well get fleeced less on arrival at your non-extradition hellhole if there is not an outstanding warrant with your name and photo.
I would try pointing evidence at someone terminally ill. Actually pay their medical expenses. Funnel some of the money from an account in scapegoat's name to your faith healing charity (religious scammers have very strong protection under US law). If the timing works out that leaves the Justice Department interrogating a corpse.
I am not a bankruptcy lawyer but it looks like you are completely right, certainly for personal bankruptcy with no significant income. I found this surprising because the bankruptcy I read most about was The SCO Group. TSG was guilty of conversion (fraudulently keeping money collected on behalf of Novell). The court appointed trustee kept right on collecting Novell's money and spent it on legal research with the judge's law firm. This continued until the money dried up then the trustee broke up the business and sold non-existent parts of it to credulous wanna-be scammers. Looks like my misunderstanding is based on what bankruptcy courts can get away with and not laws that apply to normal people.
At some point you would think that purchasing departments would be suspicious of a vendor bidding on a purchase order for too little. You then have to realize that the purchasing agents and contract managers are government employees whose degree's are in __________ Studies rather than anything actually useful and can never be fired, but are rewarded by "saving' the most money. When those bargains turn out to be fraudulent, they don't have to give up the bonuses, so no downside.
It doesn't take too much shopping to understand what things sell for. There will always be vendors that charge enormous prices for things, but still make some sales by having the items in stock and can courier said item the same day. Anybody selling for much less than average is either selling stolen gear or it's counterfeit, B-stock, refurbed/remanufactured, etc. Every once in a while somebody will just be liquidating overstock or working from their parent's basement and not passing along VAT/Sales Tax, but that's not that common.
That's the thing with selling fraudulent stuff, you don't have to sell it for ridiculously low prices - just low enough to seem like a great deal, whilst also seeming like a realistic price. So, take market prices, and drop them by 15%, and then say to customers you have a load of stock as another customer cancelled their order etc.
People generally do balk at pricing that is too low.
Depends where you shop.
If a market place is so thoroughly infested with scammers that they have to compete with each other then you can order a fake 16TB SSD for $46. The price has recently gone up from $35 because of an Ars Technica article made cost competitive fakes unavailable from Amazon - for now.
Is that actually the case? In many cases, it's actually "best value for money" but in finest Cover Your Own Arse mode, that's almost always switched to "lowest price/bidder" for any number of reasons not limited to "I don't understand the product so will buy the cheapest" and "The more I save, the bigger my bonus".
"In the UK, the legal requirement is "best value"."
Nobody is taught what 'value' is anymore and it's a very subjective concept to begin with. If you need a tyre for your car, paying 20% over nominal pricing could be a great value if you can have it fitted right now instead of in 3 days when another discount shop can have it from the warehouse. I'm willing to sacrifice quality for price on a tool that I'll use once or twice and then use to conduct toolbox/tool rust studies. If that cheap tool does the job, there's value. On the flip side, a socket set that I'm going to use a lot is a better value if it's of high quality even if it's twice the cost of the Asian import. When I had a manufacturing company, I had to weigh all of the variables all of the time. It would be pointless to spend 40 hours trying to find a savings of a few pence on some o-rings when by paying those few p more is offset by having a local vendor that will keep a month's supply on hand as a buffer. The value calculation outcome, for me, is to support the local vendor.
I have no idea how a government mob is going to define what "best value" means in the real world when people are taught by Walmart that the lowest price is the best value.
I think there's some rather large caveats to that. Such as the bids having to come from a suitable bidder (eg. it would be reasonable for a bid to be rejected if the bidder was a company on the verge of bankruptcy, or has major cashflow issues). Also, things like ensuring the bid matches the requirements - often the lowest bid doesn't tick all the boxes.
That sounds like some prosecutor hamming things up a bit.**
The worst that could happen is "it doesn't work" or "it floods the network with crap"..
I'd be interested to find out how much of this counterfeit gear was Linksys type -- commodity components.
(**Yes, its possible it could put mains voltage on the network ports. Just unlikely. The stuff would have to work well enough for people to not immediately notice its bad.)
Cisco are now on our "never ever, even if there is no alterative to the universe ending" list.
Aggressive audit. Nothing ever works full speed, or just doesn't work at all. Nickel dime for every feature that you would think are standard.
Much happier and much saner with another company's equipment.
"Nickel dime for every feature that you would think are standard."
Back in another millennium, I sometimes did speed tests as a normal part of turning up a new circuit. Since the telco didn't want a random server or an issue with my network to be the bottleneck, they'd have me do a tftp transfer between my router and theirs.
What's an appropriately sized (and readily available) file to transfer when testing out a bonded pair of T1 lines? How about the system image for the router?
Since the telco wasn't particularly careful about cleaning up their directory, I got a few versions of ios with some bonus features for our 3640 and 2501 routers. Of course, the boss couldn't quite understand that just because a pair of 2501s looked identical didn't mean they could both run the same features (when you cheaped out and didn't max out flash and RAM on one of them).
To the C&W techs that left "extra" images laying around, thank you for your service. Made my life much easier.
When he heard a problem then maybe he just sent the users to a post on TokTik and FaseBook that says that it's not a problem ...
No this is not a joke, this is just today's fraud environment - all of today's posts just react to this event, nobody's surprised are they?
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