[DoingIsLearning]

Is it though?

I never understood Mechanical and Electronic parts counterfeits. The amount of effort to create a forgery of a Louis Vuitton bag seems to have so much less effort/payoff ratio than create a fake IC or create parts with low grade steel.

Specially considering that you are risking lives and will most likely be chased for liability versus a fake handbag or whatever other luxury item.

As another example, the amount of scalpers (due to electronics parts shortage) trying to sell fake ICs to suppliers of medical devices is very scary.

[NamTaf]

‘Fake’ in this instance isn’t manufacturer B illegitimately cloning manufacturer A’s parts. It’s basically a failure of QA/QC processes being papered over.

The computing equivalent would be where how CPUs which fail QA are binned to lower spec (e.g. using 6 cores not 8, or underclocked), except in this instance it’s then still sold as the top-end chip even if it’s unstable and crashes under load sometimes.

[KennyBlanken]

Mechanical counterfeit parts absolutely make sense because the cost isn't in making a bolt a particular shape, it's in making sure all the steps in manufacture are consistent and up to standard.

Maybe most of the bolts are made of the right alloy and heat treated correctly, but you're using a crappy furnace with no temperature logging so you don't see that the furnace's temperature dips too low one morning...and you don't test as much of your runs because you cheap out on your QA staff, so you don't catch it.

[KeplerBoy]

Just think of russian aviation. They're effectively banned from buying spare parts directly from the manufacturers and they don't care about certificates as much as they are banned from flying to western nations anyways.

They're probably building or unknowingly ordering counterfeit parts and naturally those parts pop up elsewhere.

[tankenmate]

It's for this reason that Russian commercial airliner aircraft are now effectively worth 0 as the chain of certification of the planes and their parts are now broken. This may be a problem in the future as unscrupulous traders try to cert wash them back into the system in the future.

[sofixa]

Well it's handy for them that a decent chunk (400+) are stolen from international lessors, so they aren't taking a loss.

[notahacker]

They won't be able to cert wash an airframe back into the system. They might be able to falsely certify the engines and other parts

[colechristensen]

They’re often “real” ICs from the same factory selling QA rejects or running the factory over night with loose quality control and verification.

Similar with mechanical parts. Quite similar to the real article but with corners cut and verifications skipped.

[Eisenstein]

The parts are already made -- they just failed quality control, were old or surplus or reclaimed and got rebadged, or they were made 'off-hours' at the same factories that made the legit parts. There is little extra effort to be done besides the cheap labor it takes to run the machines/re-lable the components.

[inferiorhuman]

My understanding is that these are genuine parts that are past their service life respiffed to look usable. So it's more like the documentation is counterfeit than the part itself.

[matheusmoreira]

> The amount of effort to create a forgery of a Louis Vuitton bag seems to have so much less effort/payoff ratio than create a fake IC or create parts with low grade steel.

> Specially considering that you are risking lives and will most likely be chased for liability

I read an interesting book about this once: Poorly Made in China. Author tells stories of chinese factories manipulating the quality of products such as steel. The factories would gradually reduce the amount of each steel component. They'd use a little bit less iron than they need to, then a little bit less chromium... They'd gradually cut costs by manipulating quality, pocket the difference, become wealthier, all while passing the risk down to their western buyers. Nothing happened immediately, nobody even noticed until some steel scaffolding collapsed, workers fell to their deaths, someone tried to figure out what was going on and noticed the steel chemistry was all over the place.

People sociopathic enough to do stuff like this could not care less about lives or deaths. What matters is rising in life, getting rich. Life, death, safety, risk? Somebody else's problems.

[genmud]

It’s insane to watch YouTube on some of the industrial “promotional” videos from China and India. Like if you look up videos of really any manufacturing, you see shit that simply would never fly in Europe or the US because we don’t tolerate having stuff in factories that will eventually maim or kill someone.

Like if people doesn’t care about killing their coworkers they work with and can see, they sure as shit don’t care about dangerous practices that impact someone they don’t know.