Stephanie McCloskey, former employee of VisionTech in Clearwater Florida, has received her sentencing. She will serve 38 months for selling counterfeits to the military. This is the first federal prosecution involving trafficking of counterfeit integrated circuits. Shannon Wren, who was the owner of the company, has recently died of a drug overdose which one could assume was related to the stress of this case.
VisionTech was known in the industry as one of the more blatant distributors of counterfeit electronic components, but there are many more out there. We hope this sends a signal to the rest of them that it is a dangerous trade and even the potential financial gains are not worth the consequences.
To read the recent article on sentencing from the Washington Post click here.
Robb Hammond is the founder and CEO of AERI, an independent electronic component distributor operating since 1994. He is a founding member and former committee chair of SAE AS6081, the counterfeit-avoidance standard for independent distributors adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense, and a recognized authority on counterfeit detection.
