[HN Gopher] Florida Tech CEO Indicted for Selling $1B Worth of C... ___________________________________________________________________ Florida Tech CEO Indicted for Selling $1B Worth of Counterfeit Cisco Equipment Author : boeingUH60 Score : 117 points Date : 2022-07-08 20:45 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.justice.gov) (TXT) w3m dump (www.justice.gov) | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Strange - charged with one or two counts of this and that. And | not 10's of thousands of counts. Is that normal? | wmf wrote: | Yeah, prosecutors generally charge only counts that they can | really prove and only enough counts to put someone away for a | "reasonable" time. Imagine a jury having to listen to evidence | for a thousand counts, keep them straight, and decide each of | them at the end. | silisili wrote: | One thing I always try to remember is not to buy or sell | electronics in Miami. | | Every time a "person" from Miami has purchased a device from me | online, it turned out to be the address of some shady | forwarding/shipping company. They take forever and lose things, | so the actual buyer may file a claim they never got the item. | Thankfully, Swappa caught on and put some rules in place | recently. Basically, the buyer must disclose this, and once it's | delivered to said forwarder, the transaction is done. | | Every time I've purchased a phone from a seller in Miami, it's | been fraudulent in some way. Typically, phones being sold as new | that have very obvious pry marks near the screen. | | Beautiful city, but something about it seems to attract the | shadiest businesses. | walrus01 wrote: | a city with a large portion of its development built on | laundered cocaine money and the drug import trade has many | shady businesses? | | [surprisedpikachu.gif] | | I'm sure all that money buying all of those $500,000+ yachts | from south florida yacht dealers is _totally legit_ | what-imright wrote: | Have to second this. I've bought a great deal of electronics | from Miami, and most were counterfeit, misrepresented or simply | unrecoverable, damaged. To me any Florida company is | disqualified for business now. | kmacdough wrote: | Minimal regulations, but more importantly, practically zero | enforcement. I remember a local electrician saying stuff like | "ah just don't tell anyone and it'll be fine". I was utterly | unsurprised, if devastated, when the apartment complex | collapsed. | | It's best to keep regulations lean and manageable, so we don't | waste tons on unnecessary work and triple-checks, but | regulations they exist for a very good reason. | | Anyone who claims "regulations" are anti-business forget that | business aren't the core of countries OR economies. People are. | The only people who benefit from deregulation are the ones who | own the businesses. | SamuelAdams wrote: | I think this highlights a larger problem with technical | equipment. Why is it still so difficult for end users to verify | if hardware they purchased is genuine? | | Most PC manufacturers have some sort of sticker / device ID that | you send to their website. That isn't perfect but it is an | attempt. Are there other software based solutions that do a | better job of solving this problem? | wmf wrote: | Maybe customers don't want to know. | chx wrote: | Explain to me how you can counterfeit Cisco equipment. I truly | don't get it. I might be naive but I would have thought they have | custom ASICs in their products and then where are you going to | get them if not from Cisco? | lowlevel wrote: | Wonder if Rogers bought any. | hash872 wrote: | Marginally related but I've always wanted to discuss this- I met | a guy whose small business (he claims) is purchasing networking | equipment from the same Chinese factories that manufacture | Cisco/other networking company products. He told me that he | obviously just purchases in much smaller amounts, slaps his brand | on it, and then has a small number of salespeople sell them | throughout the US (he claimed to specialize in school districts | and universities). He said his prices were lower than Cisco's (or | other companies) because he has much less overhead. I think he | was born in China, so he may have an in with whoever these | factories are, possibly via personal connection. | | I can't verify some of his story, but he does legitimately run a | small, closely held business selling networking gear. And he is | clearly wealthy. Would be sort of a cool business hack if true! | rconti wrote: | He's probably not just selling stolen hardware designs, he's | probably also selling illegally copied software! | zamadatix wrote: | Most network vendors have at least some quantity (usually a | significant portion of their volume, some completely) of their | hardware sourced from Broadcom, Qualcomm, and/or Mellanox (now | Nvidia) gear they slap in their physical chassis. There are a | few exceptions (Intel has Tofino, Cisco/Juniper/Aurba design | some products or pieces of products in house, and a lot of | smaller Fortinet Firewalls are their custom NPU/SPUs without | merchant silicon in front) but overall common gear comes | includes a common base. Outright stealing a full chassis design | and sticking your logo on it would be outright wrong but just | ordering the main components to be assembled in a factory like | the other network vendors isn't a hack it's just how that | business is done. | | Of course the hardware isn't usually where differentiation | comes from, especially for school and university type | deployments, and the default software e.g. Broadcom will | provide is outright dogshit. Going back to the above having an | unauthorized copy of a box and selling unauthorized copies of | the 3rd party software would be extremely wrong and illegal but | just running with the default software or loading whitebox | software and selling services for it is the standard way of | doing things (unless you're a | Juniper/Cisco/Aruba/Extreme/Fortinet sized company in which | case you might make your own NOS). | | Sometimes vendors will be willing to go into custom logo | agreements directly, e.g. you are an ISP and use Nokia boxes in | your deployment but want them to have your ISP's logo on the | box and software page instead of Nokia's, but generally you | don't get an extremely wide margin on this type of agreement, | especially if it includes selling to 3rd parties, you get more | like a standard VAR level discount. There are also "whitebox" | vendors that handle the "get the merchant silicon into a | complete hardware solution" portion but don't cover the "and | sell it with network software or support" half, leaving that to | standard VARs. | | Long story short the situation was either poorly explained and | the business functions more as a typical network VAR (which is | definitely a place where you can make good money) or it was | actually explained well but isn't a "business hack" just | unethical and illegal. | ethbr0 wrote: | If "business hack" = stealing someone else's designs, I've got | a lot of profitable opportunities for you... | duxup wrote: | The buyers must know. The quirks / bugs of various networking | companies equipment is well known. | | I wonder if the buyers are possibly defrauding their | employers... | newsclues wrote: | Of course they are. | bastawhiz wrote: | > because he has much less overhead. | | Well, when you're selling hardware that you can't support | because it's pirated or fake, you do tend to have less | overhead. | trhway wrote: | > Customers of Aksoy's fraudulent and counterfeit devices | included hospitals, schools, government agencies, and the | military. | | the places where IT is far from the best to say the least, and | bureaucracy is the strongest. Natural "marks" for such a con. | thret wrote: | If you sell devices secretly modified in China to the military | and it comes out that you knew about it... I wonder if this | constitutes treason? | rconti wrote: | It's almost as if always chasing the low bid has consequences! | colechristensen wrote: | Perfect way to introduce malware into foreign networks: release | modified pirated Cisco software for counterfeiters | the_biot wrote: | Don't knock it as a business model: cloned hardware and pirated | Cisco software is how Huawei got their start in the networking | business. I don't know if they did malware/spyware in the | beginning, but the assumption that they do now has caught up to | them though. | Lammy wrote: | That's probably why the Justice Department are so keen to go | after these grey-market sellers: it protects NSA's own | interdiction pipeline more than it protects Cisco's bottom | line: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an- | nsa... | tendstofortytwo wrote: | Headline made it sound like the CEO of the Florida Institute of | Technology. Which... didn't make a lot of sense, but worth | pointing out that "Tech" modified "CEO", not "Florida". | [deleted] | imglorp wrote: | Here's one argument against building your own infra on prem. | alar44 wrote: | Lol yup that's why I only use cloud for my L2 switching. | gerdesj wrote: | I have a member of staff in the cloud with a torch and a pair | of binos. Back in the office we have the same setup. We run | at half duplex and avoid all that CSMA thing for speed. We | have shrunk the address part of the Ethernet II frames to one | bit and removed quite a few flags. With some extra | compression, we can do nearly one frame every few minutes, | depending on how often you have to look up our extensions | designed to save time. | | To wind up the troops, I run nmap scans every now and then | from my PC. It takes days to complete. lol. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-08 23:00 UTC)