[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)