Police seize fake IT equipment worth up to £1m

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Police have seized more than 1,000 counterfeit items of computer hardware, which could potentially have fetched almost £1m.

 

Following a tip-off from IT networking business Cisco, officers from the City of London Police's intellectual property crimes unit (PIPCU) found the dodgy equipment at an address in Herne Bay in Kent.

 

The total value of the items seized if sold individually at full list price could have been £996,000, although it is very rare for equipment to be sold like that and would more likely have netted the sellers £300,000.

 

Speaking to Sky News, PIPCU's Detective Sergeant Kevin Ives said: "Counterfeit goods, across the board, are very attractive to organised criminals.

 

"There's less risk in importing them than there is with drugs or firearms and the profit margins are very high.

 

"Especially in technology and hardware, the average person would find it very hard to know what was counterfeit and what wasn't."

 

The material had first been spotted as counterfeit by specialists from Cisco, who also attended the premises which were searched and pointed out what hardware was fake and what was legitimate.

 

Counterfeit materials are produced by criminals who are committed to fraudulently making money, the Detective Sergeant told Sky News.

 

An image of the equipment seized appears to show Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) transceivers, extremely expensive equipment which converts electrical signals to optical signals within communication networks.

 

Detective Sergeant Ives told Sky that the equipment could have been purchased by public sector bodies and - being of lower quality that official networking equipment - may have failed and disrupted their network.

 

"Without a doubt business customers would have believed these were genuine," he told Sky News.

 

 

Police seize fake IT equipment worth up to £1m

 

Wonder if any of it is in use.

[localzuk]

Only counterfeit item that I know I've come across was a USB-RS232 adapter.

[Geoff]

If it was knock off Chinese copies of Cisco kit it probably worked better than the genuine stuff too.

[FN-GM]

I suppose SFP's are easy really. Just get a compatible and switch the label. The person who installs it will probably never know its dodgy.

[Parm79]

If it was knock off Chinese copies of Cisco kit it probably worked better than the genuine stuff too.

When it come to Cisco if you think that then you are in the wrong business.

[synaesthesia]

You'd clearly be surprised these days. Just because something has a particular brand name on it doesn't mean it's always going to live up to past or present expectations. That isn't just Cisco, everyone has had dud lines. For so long I wouldn't touch anything by Cisco or Juniper as both were going through a patch of "I'd rather invest in some D-Link kit, it's more reliable".

Plus some of those "fakes", just like fake iPhones and the likes; put a copy of IOS on (sic) unoriginal hardware with a little tweaking you'd be hard pressed to spot the difference. And there have been plenty of chinese iPhone copies better than the real thing.

And how many average joe's would assume that cheap Panasonic TV for sale is actually made by Panasonic or has any links to a top brand they know other than the label on the box?

[googlemad]

I thought you could buy 'compatible' SFP anyway, remember someone saying to me once that they bought them all the time because they were just as good at a fraction of the ripoff price Cisco wanted to charge and would just have a few spares around in case of failures - maybe I'm getting confused with something else.

 

(Obviously if the fakes were actually labelled as Cisco that would be wrong)

[Blue_Cookeh]

I think people that buy first party SFPs are daft, the compatible ones haven't ever failed me, and cost single digits compared to the likes of Cisco and HP who wanted towards triple digits for them.

 

If it's counterfeit routers and switches etc then fair game to the police and Cisco.

[AlanD]

Ever since my ridiculously expensive genuine Netgear ones started failing I started looking around - and since finding some cheap compatibles I have never looked back. Genuine ones continue to fail...and not one of the compatibles have failed despite lasting years longer.