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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

Counterfeit products seem to becoming a near universal problem. It's not just amazon, but other marketplaces (eBay, taobao etc). Even seems like major electronic component suppliers fall foul of this sometimes (digikey).

I can really only see three solutions:

1. We just buy everything direct from the supplier. Companies like amazon manage distribution. 2. We provide tools to allow the consumer to track the supply chain process. Products shipped with unique QR code, printed at the of manufacture? Users able to verify that this product was actually manufactured by the stated supplier. Could be an interesting startup idea? 3. Consumers get better at evaluating products on their own merits. Verifying battery capacity, performance etc.

3 is basically what you have to do if you purchase anything in Shenzhen markets. You can't just trust a particular supplier, or even that one batch has the same performance characteristics as the last.

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A lot of Chinese manufacturers use authenticity codes hidden under a scratch-off panel. The authenticity code can be verified on the manufacturer's website; the website will confirm that the code is genuine and alert the user if it has been previously used. It's a cheap and reasonably effective method.

http://blog.vapeclub.co.uk/how-to-check-your-vape-device-is-... http://www.skyrc.com/antifake/indexen.php http://sjcamhd.com/safe/

That's neat, but it feels like it would work better with a trusted central authority. I guess there are a few reasons:

1. The central authority takes pressure of the manufacture to build a verification system. 2. They could provide a single unified interface to consumers. Single QR validation app etc. 3. They could help track a product though resales. Which maybe more in the consumers, rather than manufacturers interests. 4. They could proactively investigate counterfeit claims. Potentially across different product lines.

This is actually exactly what our company (assembly.com - YCS15) does.

We're now at the stage where we provide effectively a full supply chain solution. It works like this:

1. Product company has an issue like this and contacts us

2. We work with the factory, setup our quality control hardware+software.

3. The product company defines all of the procedures for validating that a product works and is legitimate. All of those are performed by our team on the China side. Individual units are serialized with QR codes and photographed and videoed during inspections.

The combination of unique QR in our system and natural markings on products is usually enough to validate authenticity. We have a few other systems we use to further validate the product, but on a high level and as the most cost effective part of our solution, this already helps far more than doing nothing.

We've helped prevent a large amount of fraud that was previously occurring for some customers. Interesting to see this start to become a larger issue on Amazon's side.

4. We're currently working on moving the serialization and validation to more steps in the supply chain, continuing to validate authenticity + quality closer and closer to the customer.

Interesting! At what price point (for the end user) does this start to make sense?

Even #1 isn't 100% safe. Ubiquiti had counterfeit product get mixed into their own fulfillment chain. Let me repeat that, they had counterfeit product make its way into their own fulfillment chain, which was then sold legitimately to customers.

Then again, this is the same company that fell prey to Nigerian spammers. Wouldn't go near any of their products as they definitely have some roomtemp IQ's in that joint.

Ubiuiti products seem really nice. However I've heard many bad things about their management culture.

I really don't get how you can get fake product into you own fulfillment chain. But I guess if you sign off on fake invoices that could happen. :)

I'm assuming it happened when buying from their FBA store. That would happen because they didn't tick the box preventing Amazon from commingling inventory and someone else listed a fake "Ubiquiti router".

Just listing it wouldn't have been enough. The counterfeiter would have had to ship product to amazon through FBA.

This happened outside of Amazon. Counterfeit product literally made it into their distributor's warehouses and was sold as legit. It's well-known, look it up on $search_engine: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ubiquiti-plunges-on-struggl...

If you're dumb enough to fall prey to Nigerian scammers to the tune of $39M....

Software support longevity can be iffy on certain product lines. Maybe 1 update, but not much beyond 6 months.

> Ubiuiti products seem really nice. However I've heard many bad things about their management culture

I want to know more about this. I'm not interested in buying from companies that have a tradition of having abusive or exploitative relationship with their employees, whenever it is possible to do so (I rightly acknowledge that its pretty hard to do. Almost every large company has been sued or been reported to have some sort of x y or z issue with their employees. I also try to be judicious about how I make exceptions. Its hard nowadays.)

Its one of the reasons I walked away from amazon.

edit: for what its worth, googling around with various search terms led to not much. The Glassdoor ratings also showed up at 4.x out of 5 (can't recall the exact number). So i'd be interested to hear more about it if you have anything to share

Glassdoor reviews appear to be routinely faked. At least in my experience.

Once company I follow on glassdoor, after having an average rating of 2 for years has been getting a new 5 star review once a week for the last 2 months. This seems to be how companies get round any filtering glassdoor has in place, they slowly post good reviews over a period of months.

I wouldn't trust their review averages. Maybe look at the baseline number of negative reviews, and see if the comments seem valid.

I think this is the case for anything where anyone can write a review. The same happens with restaurant reviews, for instance: people affiliated with the restaurant will write glowing, positive reviews to try to drown out the angry 1-star ratings from pissed-off customers.

The thing to do with any kind of rating system like this is to weight the positive reviews far less than the negative reviews. Also read the positive reviews with a critical eye; the ones by "plants" are usually somewhat obvious.

It's well known companies have shill Glassdoor ratings.

Well that's good to know after buying a bunch of their aps off amazon. Although I feel it would be really easy to detect a fake with them.

> 2. We provide tools to allow the consumer to track the supply chain process. Products shipped with unique QR code, printed at the of manufacture? Users able to verify that this product was actually manufactured by the stated supplier. Could be an interesting startup idea?

Yes, it does sound like a fantastic opportunity! How would it work though? Every single instance of product would have to have its own id that would "expire" as soon as it's verified by an end-user, to prevent counterfeiters from copying a number and running with it?

Even then, it would be possible to copy numbers from products not yet delivered, and use them on counterfeits. Or you have to have a destructive process to reveal the number (like a scratch-off).

There would still be many ways to cheat: opening the boxes and replacing the genuine product with a fake, or the used market, etc.

Still, an interesting problem!

The method you describe is already in widespread use by Chinese manufacturers.

I would say a peel off tab covering the code might work so you know it's been tampered with.

A few thing could be used to prevent copying. Users could be allowed to register a name on the verification page. If you try and register a product and it's already registered you know it's fake.

I don't think it would work in every instance. But it would increase costs to the counterfeiter. Hopefully to the point that it becomes economically unsustainable.

Because this particular cheat has happened to us and we added systems to prevent it:

We already do serialize each unit for customers. So when cases started appearing like this we would also apply another code to the box the unit is placed into. Our system then associates both of them - taking photos of each when that occurs.

This prevents the changing of what unit is in a box.

Peeling off the sticker is actually pretty easily prevented entirely by the photo, humans aren't very good at placing stickers exactly the same way as they're initially applied. Compounded by our use of self-destructive stickers where possible.

Your solution #2 is one of the major selling points of "blockchain".

Unfortunately the hard part is getting everyone along a supply-chain to participate in a new tracking standard that could easily reveal valuable information to competitors. So it's probably not going to be adopted except in cases where counterfeiting is an obviously greater threat.

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