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Comment by robryk | Hacker News Reader

If one counterfeits a chip using something that will not work at all, why put any chip inside at all? Why not just place a resistor between VCC and GND?

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There's a market for some old, obscure, obsolete ICs. People approach brokers, who search for them.

Other people - scam artists - see what's being searched for, and take a different IC in the same package and remove the existing markings, and put new fake markings on. They then sell this as the other IC.

By the time the ICs are tested the money has gone. (Which should be a hint - if they're not offering regular invoicing and 30 days payment they might not be trustworthy).

tl;dr not enough people design _for production_, and it makes things much harder.

When you just need one to a few of something, no vendor is going to bother with giving you quotes/invoices/etc when they know you a) aren't a big company to keep around for future business and b) aren't buying enough for any of that extra work to be worth it. If I'm working on an SBC and need a couple floppy driver chips, I'm not going to find any "real" vendors that have them in stock. All I'm going to find are second-hand dealers that might be selling fakes.

I'm guessing they buy surplus chips and change the markings. Cheaper and easier than manufacturing and bonding a resistor die.

In this case, they were just taking an existing chip and relabeling it to something with the same pin-out/form-factor that they could sell for a higher value.

Perhaps the DTMF chips were under some kind of patent/royalty and were being smuggled into the country?

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