By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Piracy is a problem in the tech world and a major strain on doing business with China in particular, but what about when your entire company is pirated? And what if it isn’t a little company, but a huge electronics behemoth as big as NEC? Sounds strange? That’s what we thought until we started researching this issue more.

It seems that Chinese piracy experts not only started duplicating and selling NEC branded products, they began setting up fake NEC factories and warehouses, in essence, hijacking the brand and the operations of an entire company by impersonating the company itself. A pirating first.

Like hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers now locked in a war of attrition with intellectual property thieves in China, the company hired an investigator to track down the pirates. After two years and thousands of hours of investigation in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in China, Taiwan and Japan, the company said it had uncovered something far more ambitious than clandestine workshops turning out inferior copies of NEC products. The pirates were faking the entire company.

Evidence seized in raids on 18 factories and warehouses in China and Taiwan over the past year showed that the counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Source: Intenational Herald Tribune

We Say: Wow. That’s on a whole other dimension. Two questions: if the goods were for sale and this has been going on for some time, how can we tell what NEC products are actually the real deal? And if it could happen to NEC, who’s to say who isn’t being scammed by a simailar setup? Scary business, literally.