Distributor nabbed for counterfeit trademarks

Home Channel News, May 3, 1999

Melville, N.Y. - A warehouse owner is facing charges following a raid where police seized four truckloads of more than 100,000 counterfeit trademarked electrical parts.

A grand jury indicted the owner of Advanced Lighting Products on felony charges of counterfeit trademark as a result of an undercover operation on his business March 9, said detective Ed Solomon of the Suffolk County District Attorney's office.

Among the items recovered were "a substantial quantity of bogus ground fault circuit interrupters that could be extremely dangerous," Solomon said. Electrical cords, light fixtures and bean clamps - all bearing allegedly counterfeit Underwriters Laboratories (UL) marks - were also seized in the raid.

UL's Melville office alerted law enforcement officials that the warehouse was bringing in defective parts with phony UL labels from China, explained Brian Monks, a senior staff engineer with the UL.

The warehouse operator was selling faulty ground fault circuit interrupters for $1.99, one-third the usual retail price for legitimate versions of the product, said Monks, who played a role in the bust by posing as a contractor who wanted to purchase discounted electrical parts.

It was not immediately clear how many of the defective parts were on the market, but the unidentified owner was selling to businesses worldwide, Solomon said.

Despite the indictment, U.S. Customs Service agents on April 16 intercepted a shipment of electrical parts with counterfeit UL marks that were headed to the Ronkonkoina warehouse from a ship off Newark, N.J., Solomon and Monks said. The warehouse raid may have "come at a point where he could not stop the shipment from coming in," said Solomon. The U.S. Customs Service could not immediately confirm the Newark seizure.

An NHCN special report published in November 1997 warned that increasing "pricing pressures and global sourcing were making home improvement stores more susceptible to stocking faulty, even dangerous, products, some of which bear fraudulent safety labels." The original story can be found online at www.homecenternews.com