Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the take-two-tablets-and-call-me... dept.

A Chinese national living in the US has been sentenced to 37 months in prison for taking part in a scheme to import counterfeit Apple products, the Department of Justice has announced. The products, which included fake iPhones and iPads, were smuggled from China into the US. After serving time, Jianhua "Jeff" Li, 44, will also get one year of supervised release, the DOJ said Tuesday.

More than 40,000 electronic devices and accessories, as well as fake labels and packaging with Apple trademarks, were trafficked and smuggled into the US between July 2009 and February 2014.

The fake labels and phony Apple products were shipped separately to avoid detection by customs, the DOJ said.

"The devices were then shipped to conspirators all over the United States," the Justice Department said. "Proceeds were funneled back to conspirator accounts in Florida and New Jersey via structured cash deposits and then a portion was transferred to conspirators in Italy, further disguising the source of the funds.

More than $1.1 million in sales proceeds were wired from US accounts into accounts that Li controlled overseas, the agency said.

https://www.cnet.com/news/counterfeit-apple-products-land-chinese-national-3-year-prison-sentence/

Also at:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-sentenced-over-three-years-prison-trafficking-counterfeit-apple-goods-united
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/fake-apple-chinese-national-3-years-smuggling-counterfeit-goods

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/30/counterfeit-iphone-trafficker-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:34PM (2 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:34PM (#873580)

    Great question. I wonder, how do you fake something that complex? If they're that good at copying and making them, why don't they strike up a deal with Apple? Either way, I'm sure they're shipping them around the rest of the world. Maybe they're real ones, siphoned off of the assembly lines? "...conspirators in Italy", hmmm.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @08:20PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @08:20PM (#873716)

    If they're that good at copying and making them, why don't they strike up a deal with Apple?

    Copying something is much easier than creating it. It's much easier to reverse engineer an iPhone and then reproduce it than to create it in the first place. As a more obvious example, do you think that it really costs $20 to print out a physical book and ship it around the world to your door? Or does it only cost $2 to make and ship the thing, and the other $18 go to other purposes (including profit to the company making the product)?

    Moreover, it could be the counterfeiters are using the same factories and paying the manufacturers on the down-low to run another production run.

    That's assuming the product is good. If you want to make shoddy products (and why not, it's not YOUR name and reputation the line, after all), then there are lots more options. You can take the QA failed devices and sell them. You can create completely fake products and sell them, (such as 128GB USB drives which only are 1GB large and drop everything above that to /dev/null).

    Creating counterfeits is easy. Creating counterfeits which have the quality of the original is more difficult, but still easier than the billions spent on new R&D.

    • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:05PM

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:05PM (#873746)

      Not that you're wrong or anything, but I assumed he was selling cheap Android phones with Apple logos on them, and calling them iPhones.

      That was a thing when iPhones first came out.
      A friend of mine bought one back from China. It looked quite a lot like an iPhone (version 3 maybe?) if you squinted, but ran some awful feature phone OS that did not really work properly.

      He was well aware of what he was buying, but as it cost something like $40 it was a sort of curiosity rather than a ripoff.