Fla. Man Indicted for Running Cisco Fake-Import Operation

A federal grand jury in Newark, New Jersey, indicted a Florida man Thursday on charges of running a trafficking operation that imported more than $1 billion in fraudulent and counterfeit Cisco networking devices since 2014, said DOJ Friday. Onur Aksoy, 38, of Miami, ran at least 19 companies formed in New Jersey and Florida, plus more than two dozen Amazon and eBay online storefronts, that imported the devices from China and Hong Kong and resold them in the U.S., falsely claiming the goods were new, said DOJ. The imported devices were older, lower-end goods that had been sold or discarded but later modified by Chinese counterfeiters to look like newer and more expensive Cisco products. The counterfeiters added pirated Cisco software and unreliable components to defeat measures that Cisco embedded in the software to enforce license compliance, said DOJ. Efforts to reach Aksoy's lawyers Friday were unsuccessful.