Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527276
OCTOBER 2024 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 29 Counterfeiting is a crime of opportunity, where there is demand for the product. e money to be made must be worth their while. Until three or four years ago, wire fraud worked like this: A U.S. company would place an order with a company in China. e Chi- nese vendor would send photographs of the part, and everything checked out. e Ameri- can company would then wire transfer $10,000. e next day, the Chinese company would email or fax a shipping document with a FedEx number, and the U.S. customer would go to FedEx, type in the number, and see that it's a 12-pound box. It seems legit. Seven days later, they get a package, but instead of the parts they ordered, it's a box of rusted forks. It got so bad that vendors didn't even have the decency to ship you a box of rusted forks. ey just took your money and ceased all com- munication. We put out several white papers about it, but wire fraud is still a big problem. What can companies do to prevent things like this? e best thing is to go into our database and verify the vendor. I could show you one case where the company had been reported 37 times for wire fraud; anybody who looked it up would have known that. You can also access our database for the U.S. government's Denied Party list of about a half- dozen agencies—Bureau of Science and Indus- try, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, etc.—and it's mostly driven by sanc- tions. ey have individuals and companies that Americans are not allowed to do business with through ignorance or manipulation. Very rarely is it through malicious intent, but some companies are shipping products to U.S. com- panies that the U.S. government says are not allowed to have our material in hand. So, these U.S. companies are getting visited by the guys in black suits with gold badges, getting their hands smacked and fined. at could have been avoided had they taken the 30 seconds to look at our database. Since ERAI tracks trends and statistics, what are the numbers telling you? is chart (Figure 1) shows the number of counterfeit part reports that ERAI has pub- lished from 2005 to the end of 2023. e yel- low line is global semiconductor sales. Gener- ally speaking, the number of counterfeit parts Figure 1: Reported parts vs. global semiconductor sales, 2005-2023.