Keep your kit kosher

A friend took a watch to a repairer recently only to be told his expensive-looking timepiece was a worthless fake. Fortunately, it wasn’t that much of a shock. After all, it only cost a few pounds, and if you looked hard enough you could see “Rolox” written on the dial.

We’re more or less inured now to brandnames being ripped off. But it doesn’t just happen to watches, handbags and trainers. IT hardware can also be faked.

Audit firm KPMG estimates at least one in 10 IT products is counterfeit, at a cost to the industry of around $100bn a year. And, just as with consumer items, it’s the big-name brands that are affected the most. Cisco fakes, in particular, are all too common.

Fake network hardware started to appear two or three years ago, with Cisco and other vendors blaming unscrupulous resellers and vowing to come down hard on any caught handling such goods. Yet the problem has grown. The trend towards manufacturing in the Far East and China is now cited as the prime reason.

It’s a common enough scenario. A big networking vendor like Cisco moves its manufacturing operations to China to cut production costs. The resulting lower prices lead to more products being sold – a win-win result for vendor and customers alike. The factories also gain, but nowhere near as much, mainly because they have to accept rock-bottom prices for the products they make.

But intellectual property isn’t particularly well protected in China. And language and cultural differences make it difficult to manage such partners as closely as might otherwise be possible.

So the factories make Cisco-branded kit during the day, possibly at a loss, and make up the deficit in extra overnight shifts that produce the same kit from the same designs for sale through the counterfeit channel.

But even when it’s the same hardware made in the same factory, counterfeit kit lacks a lot more than just a logo.

In particular, it’s not subject to the same quality controls. Rejects are just as valuable to the counterfeiter as perfect samples – they just have to appear to work.

The customer’s cost saving then goes up in a puff of smoke. With fakes sold alongside the real items at the same prices, nobody is the wiser until they go wrong. It’s then, when the warranty procedures kick into action, that counterfeits are most likely to be detected.

Reputable resellers honour warranties on anything they supply, but not all resellers are reputable, and the small print in a contract can be hard to argue. Plus, you can’t count on a sympathetic ear from the brand-owning vendor as you didn’t actually buy the fakes from it.

It’s a classic case of buyer beware. The best defence is not to buy anything if you’re not sure of it. As Shaw Taylor used to say on Police 5, “Keep ’em peeled.”