Explain to me how you can counterfeit Cisco equipment. I truly don't get it. I might be naive but I would have thought they have custom ASICs in their products and then where are you going to get them if not from Cisco?
(A) Real products that are being sold on the black market, think of these as stolen from the factory. They're cheaper because nobody is paying the royalties.
(B) High quality knock offs that are made at the same factory with the same materials and tools. These might be slightly less well made.
(C) What you think of as fake. Just junk.
Most people encounter A and B without ever knowing it.
https://www.servethehome.com/fake-cisco-switches-in-the-supp...
According to the indictment, the devices the Pro Network Entities imported from China and Hong Kong were typically older, lower-model products, some of which had been sold or discarded, which Chinese counterfeiters then modified to appear to be genuine versions of new, enhanced, and more expensive Cisco devices. As alleged, the Chinese counterfeiters often added pirated Cisco software and unauthorized, low-quality, or unreliable components – including components to circumvent technological measures added by Cisco to the software to check for software license compliance and to authenticate the hardware. Finally, to make the devices appear new, genuine, high-quality, and factory-sealed by Cisco, the Chinese counterfeiters allegedly added counterfeited Cisco labels, stickers, boxes, documentation, packaging, and other materials
That's a very 2001 way of product design - the vast vast majority of networking hardware (even the super expensive and complicated security stuff) uses off the shelf chips from Cavium (for CPU), Xilinx (FPGA), etc. packaged up in a manner optimized for it's purpose.
Almost nobody is spinning custom ASICs for network hardware these days - the cost/benefit over an FPGA just isn't there.