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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The CBP is very hard to deal with. I once bought about 100 electronic items that come with AC adapters to power them.

Unknown to me, the AC adapters had fake UL marks on them. So, the CBP seized the shipment. I asked if they could just seize the adapters, and explained that I hadn't even asked for UL listed adapters. No dice. The adapters represented less than 10% of the value of the shipment. Argh.

And, of course, the Chinese supplier wasn't willing to reimburse me. Now I have the adapters go in a separate shipment in case something unexpected is shipped.

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CBP has no idea what your intention is.

Would you agree that a reasonable assumption that if an electronic is shipped with an AC adaptor, then that electronic will be used with it?

And CBP does not have a crystal ball:

- Are you using it as is?

- If the UL marking is fake, who is to know about the entire thing?

- Are you going to resell this? If so, is the AC adaptor going with it?

- How do they know that this was an honest mistake? Do they take the your word at face value?

I could go on and on with scenarios. I get it, that is not fun. But I will ask you, what should they have done?

"what should they have done?"

Seized the adapters. That would have been enough for me to be more careful about adapters in the future. Seizing the whole shipment hurts me, but not the supplier.

See my other example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469959

There's any number of things you might not expect, and the receiver is the only one hurt when they are a smaller player.

Respectfully, how would they be able to verify that a) you are being truthful, and b) that only part of the shipment is real, when once part has been shown not to be?

by your logic shouldn't they also seize all future shipments sent to and/or from the shipper?

Yeah, or least inspect them much more closely.

If you bought something and it arrived and was a fake, would you buy from that shipper again?

If you bought something that was fake, would you want me to seize everything you buy in the future, after you pay?

The main part was not a "branded" item at all. It was an LED thing where no part of the item would be listed, branded, etc. They saw them because they unboxed quite a few of them to find the adapters with the fake UL mark.

You seem assume that CBP will just trust you on your word alone. That's my entire point. They don't know what your intentions with this are, nor if you are being truthful.

If that's true... then they should investigate, not make an assumption and simply capture all of someones valuable property.

OP is inside of the US, and probably lives here as well. He's not a flight risk, and its totally reasonable to ask them to go through slow bureaucratic means to make sure they get it right.

CBP acts like they are the first line in a war when really they ought to be helping people come into compliance, and track down bad suppliers.

> CBP acts like they are the first line in a war

Taped to the wall on the Sault Ste. Marie crossing CBP station:

"We Are The First Line Of Defense"

I think there is more to the story here than being told really. I bet they did investigate, and the poster didn't have documentation. Why are we assuming the commenter is being totally.honest?

Why would I want adapters with fake UL marks? The adapter is a very small amount of the cost.

Obviously one would want them to save money. Same reason the seller put fake marks on.

No, I'm saying they saw the main item with their own eyes.

So...CBP are now magically EEs and should now know everything about electronics?

They could see it had no brand labels, or labels of any kind. No magic required.

The only issue you’ve really highlighted is that criminals should be sure to buy properly UL labeled electronics.

They don’t know what anyone’s intentions are except to apply electrical components to solving a problem.

Should they stop all electronics shipments? Except for the Apples of the world?

Would that make you feel safer?

The occasional irrational actor isn’t as real a threat to me as my constantly paranoid neighbors and government.

I have absolutely no idea why “trust” and “intentions” are relevant here.

Why should CBP siege all the electronics if just the adapters are not legal? Sure, if the main electronics also have counterfeit UL marks then they also should be seized, but if the main electronics aren’t counterfeit why should invalid adapters be the grounds for seizing everything else?

So how do you know everything is legit and not just the adaptors?

You are "trusting" the poster here and assuming there "intentions" are good.

I don’t know if the rest of the electronics were legit or not, but I sure hope CBP would be able to tell the difference rather than just asking. Seems like it’s literally their job to determine this kind of thing. If they can’t determine whether or not the rest of the shipment was valid and had to try and determine OP’s intentions, then I genuinely doubt if they should even be seizing anything at all.

As far as me “trusting” OP on the story, well yeah, it’s a random HN comment. Literally nothing is at stake here. If you’re going to start assuming that OP is lying for HN cred then be my guest, but it seems needlessly paranoid to me.

You can say that about pretty much anything and anyone. What is truth anyway?

It doesn't matter.

The burden of truth is supposed to be on the accuser.

Consider if you will - a robber is caught by police in his own house. In this house, they found the items the robber stole. Should they:

a) take the items the robber stole b) take everything

Thanks to civil asset forfeiture laws, the police will in fact b) take everything.

That's probably covered by criminal forfeiture if the robber is convicted.

In a civil case like the one above, its based on a preponderance of evidence. Are you saying that when one device is fake, I should give the benefit of the doubt and assume no other is?

All the adapters were fake. Not the computers.

Have you considered using a US based supplier instead?

There are large categories of products, this one included, where there are ZERO remaining US suppliers.

The only other country I could find with the products was Taiwan, and it wasn't 100% clear if they were just importing Chinese products. They were significantly more expensive.

>There are large categories of products, this one included, where there are ZERO remaining US suppliers.

I don't know very well how patents and intellectual property protection work... But, if there are no suppliers of such a product in the United States (assuming your previous argument as true), then what product is being pirated? if there is none (worth the redundancy), to my understanding, there has to be a vendor whose product is being counterfeited within the united states for it to be taken as an infringement of intellectual property.

Other than that, you were not entitled to a trial? They just confiscated everything and there it ended?

It was a UL mark. Underwriters Laboratories. They are a company that tests products for electrical safety.

The manufacturer of the AC adapter didn't pay for testing, but put the mark on the adapter. The adapters weren't the main thing I was importing, so I hadn't paid any attention to it in the order process. The technical reason for the seizure was trademark violation.

Oh I understand, that is a really specific detail, they surely deduced that you wanted to sell them (for the amount (100)) although I am not sure if that was your intention. I think there should be a public blacklist of companies that are dedicated to piracy (because it is quite common, especially in China).

>The technical reason for the seizure was trademark violation.

Do you know what a trademark is? This wasn't a trademark violation, it was a fake certification.

The reason for the seizure is I don't want electronics in my house that could burn it down. UL cetifiies that. That's NOT a trademark. That's a certification.

You really don't seem to understand that you were caught trying to import bogus goods. It's also concerning that you are mixing up terms (trademark vs certification), as it casts doubt on the one side of the story I am hearing from you.

I get that it may not be your fault, but the CBP doesn't know that. They don't have a crystal ball to know that you were innocent of it, nor are they EEs who can figure out that's real and what's not. They also shouldn't be. Use a more trustworthy supplier next time.

The certification is enforced by having a trademark on the logo, that’s the easiest way to put conditions on the use of a mark.

I have the letters from the CBP. It's all "trademark", no mention of safety, testing, etc. Tons of products are sold with no testing, and no mark, by the way.

I do understand the issues, and would not have sold products using those adapters knowing the UL mark was fake. The cost to get "real" adapters was a trivial portion of the overall cost.

However, that was NOT at all what the CBP was complaining about.

> Seized the adapters. That would have been enough for me to be more careful about adapters in the future. Seizing the whole shipment hurts me, but not the supplier.

Where the adapters packaged separately to make that possible? Or are you asking some customs inspector to unbox all your items, remove the adapters, and repack it all?

They could have me do it. Also, they do it eventually to auction off the main parts.

Do you have a link to the auctioned off parts? I'm curious now

It was several years ago. I do still have some of the CBP letters, but I don't think the auctions are archived.

How about the government doesn't steal people's stuff!? Unless the item contained improperly secured radioactive material or something like that, I see zero reason why the state should have the right to seize someone's property for attempting to ship it into the country from another locale. If society is concerned about vendors here in the USA selling dodgy stuff, there are far superior solutions like regulating retailers and hold them accountable that do not require invasive boarder searches. Customs inspection are 99% a complete scam designed to enable the government to steal money and property from people.

I dunno, that sounds correct to me (contra the article here where they're just mindbogglingly wrong). The customs process isn't designed to prioritize customer value, it's designed to prevent counterfeit goods from reaching the market. These were counterfeit. Demanding that they part out the shipment for you to separate the stuff-they-can't-prove-is-counterfeit from the stuff-recipient-actually-wants isn't their job.

You bought bad goods from a bad supplier and got scammed. That's not the fault of the police.

They wouldn't "part it out", they would let me do it. This was an air shipment and the goods were in the same city I'm in.

While I'm not happy with the supplier, I don't think this was intentional on their part either. They just source AC adapters from someone else in Shenzhen. You can imagine they aren't real familiar with the consequences of trademark infringement. Which is what this was.

Edit: Note that it was all auctioned off later without the adapters. So the concept is known to them.

They would do the same thing if your car was impounded because you were driving around and selling drugs.

I'm not a fan of civil forfeiture either. Pretty clearly skirts due process and the presumption of innocence.

Gotta say, this argument that you aren't responsible for the illegal items in your shipment, and the sender isn't responsible for them either, really drives home to me the importance of these CBP inspections.

I didn't say I wasn't responsible. Just arguing what the consequences should be for what was pretty clearly an unintentional violation.

Also, see my friend's experience of a CD-ROM with a fake "Compact Disc" mark that resulted in a shipment of SBC's getting seized. Perhaps that one is more clear where the receiver wouldn't have any idea to even ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469959

I will also hazard a guess that many HN folks have ordered things like generic arduinos, led blinky stuff, etc, and gotten an adapter with a fake UL mark. Smaller scale, but the same thing nonetheless.

>While I'm not happy with the supplier, I don't think this was intentional on their part either. They just source AC adapters from someone else in Shenzhen. You can imagine they aren't real familiar with the consequences of trademark infringement. Which is what this was.

So you were their first U.S. customer and they'd never shipped anything to the U.S. before?

After experiencing this, I checked around. Adapters with fake UL marks are everywhere. All over Amazon.com, for example. I honestly hadn't considered it before buying. Had no idea it was a common issue.

I think I was just shipping during some customs frenzy to actually do something about it.

Since I'm now better educated about the potential fake UL marks, thought I'd note that it's pretty rampant.

The first result for "Raspberry PI Power Supply" on Amazon for me, is this: https://www.amazon.com/NorthPada-Tinker-Supply-Charger-Adapt... I get similar results with other searches for adapters and power supplies.

It's a fake UL mark. The manufacturer isn't listed in UL's database, and a genuine UL mark would almost always have the UL listing number right below it.

There's also lots of adapters there with no UL or Intertek marks or testing.

Did you try sourcing adaptors without fake markings?

I thought it was pretty clear that the fake markings surprised me and that the adapters were not the main item sourced.

It was, but the follow-up action designed to minimize risk of loss when caught by customs rather than avoiding import of fraudulent goods blurred image of your intentions.

If you can get the shipments split, I'm sure you could also get them to not send the power adapters at all. If, however, you needed power adapters, you need to import proper ones - not just for legal reasons, but for the safety of the end-users.

As a smaller player, it is very difficult to get the Chinese suppliers to guarantee they won't ship the wrong thing.

Separating the shipment is a relatively low cost way to protect the main item.

Edit: Another example that happened to a friend. He ordered some single board computers that came with some software on a CD...he wasn't even aware of the CD. The CD had a fake "Compact Disc" marking, which is a trademark. Whole shipment seized.

This whole thing seems crazy to me (I don't do a lot of importing). Customs has the ability to determine if the UL logo on a charger is fake or if a phrase breaks trademark law, and then confiscates an _entire_ shipment?

Why is it CBP/custom's job to enforce trademark law? I could just as easily print a fake logo in the US, but border control won't come after me - the people responsible for enforcing those laws will.

It seems you have absolutely no legal recourse here too, and it hurts American businesses. I know the US is far from libertarian, but this seems like overreach in the strangest way possible.

Also, they auctioned it all off later, sans the adapters. So they get the concept :)

Could you buy them at auction?

The winning bid was higher than what I paid :)

Wait so they effectively imported items into the country themselves, punished you and made a buck on it? Wasn't the purpose to prevent counterfeits? Or did they trash the adapters and auctioned the main item only?

Yes, they trashed the adapters and auctioned the main item. The winning bid was well below retail pricing, but much higher than wholesale cost.

Huh.. it seems like you’d have a claim.. I am surprised.

It’s CBPs job because consumers have no idea if the UL or Intertek logo is legit or not. Because those adapters aren’t listed they don’t have to follow the electrical and fire safety standards. So a purchaser may be tricked into buying something that is much more likely to burn their house down. Having CBP intercept it makes perfect sense.

> Intertek

I don't think anyone cares about Intertek logos. /s

On safety, note that the same adapters could have shipped with no UL mark. CPB was enforcing trademarks, not safety.

Edit: Regarding below, sure. But there are tons of unlisted adapters that come with electronics you might buy. I'd hazard a guess that most people have at least one in their house. Not that it's okay, just noting that it's common.

However safety expectations are tied to that trademark.

>It was, but the follow-up action designed to minimize risk of loss when caught by customs rather than avoiding import of fraudulent goods blurred image of your intentions.

It seems pretty clear to me, I think you're missing the point of the post. It's that this person is protecting his business in a way that's effective because the government isn't, and this is what he's forced to do when dealing with agencies that claim they're looking out for his best interests.

CBP in this case isn't looking out for his best interest, they're looking out for the consumer's best interest. Counterfeit goods? Well, now the whole thing is suspect. It makes sense to me.

Counterfeit probably isn't the best word for this. It was whatever brand adapter it said it was. The UL mark was fake.

After this happened I found that's pretty common. Not that it's okay, but there's tons of generic electronics on Amazon that come with adapters with a fake UL mark.

They are absolutely counterfeit. They don't need UL brand standards but are represented as such.

Yeah, that's what the custom text box on the order page is for. I always specify "please no fake markings, no anthrax spores, no xenomorph eggs and no methamphetamine" just to be in the clear.

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