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Comment by newacct583 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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