Do your due diligence
Fraudsters are masters at sniffing out a good opportunity…and it doesn’t get much better than a shortage of chips needed by manufacturers desperate to stay on a production schedule and to meet customer demand. The existence of counterfeit semiconductor components in the market is nothing new. Counterfeiters have been working to infiltrate the high tech market for years. However, the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and other causative factors leading to the chip shortage provides counterfeiters with new opportunities to peddle their fraudulent components.
A task force of experts on counterfeit semiconductors from 6 worldwide semiconductor industry associations have agreed on the following, more concise definition: “Semiconductor counterfeiting is considered the act of fraudulently manufacturing, altering, distributing, or offering a product or package that is represented as genuine.”
If you’re company doesn’t have the opportunity to reliably make factory-direct purchases you may need to start exploring alternative avenues. This thinking is exactly what has given counterfeit fabricators opportunities to prosper. Counterfeiting is costing the industry billions and needs to be stamped out through detection and better testing. Performing your own testing is what ensures you and your customers are getting what you are expecting. Counterfeiting is very profitable, and fraudsters go to great lengths to protect their business. As they get smarter in producing and hiding counterfeits, it becomes mission critical that we get better at taking them down.
Some products rely on dozens or even hundreds of chips and in the automotive industry, thousands of semiconductor components are needed. Failure of just one of these can be catastrophic. Semiconductor purchases from the open market that are initially viewed as inexpensive can turn into an extremely costly mistake, especially if system failures result in millions of dollars in warranty expenses or liability claims against your company. That cost grows exponentially as you factor in reputation damage and even greater, there’s the possibility of the loss of life due to equipment failure.
Plan your winning strategy against counterfeit purchases. Download the eBook, Do Your Due Diligence