---
title: "Counterfeit Industrial Parts: Costs, Risks, and the Real Numbers"
slug: counterfeit-industrial-parts-costs-risks
url: /topics/guides/counterfeit-industrial-parts-costs-risks/index.md
publishedAt: "2026-11-06T17:57:34"
updatedAt: "2026-11-06T17:57:34"
excerpt: "By the editors at Reliable. Last updated November 6, 2026. The short version: Counterfeit and pirated goods accounted for up to 2.3% of global trade in 2021, about $467 billion, according to the OECD and the European Union Intellectual Property Office. U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 79 million counterfeit items in fiscal 2025, […]"
authors:
  - Reliable Media
---

# Counterfeit Industrial Parts: Costs, Risks, and the Real Numbers

By [Reliable Media](/authors/reliable-media/index.md)

By the editors at Reliable. Last updated November 6, 2026.

## Counterfeit Parts at a Glance

## What Counts as a Counterfeit Part

The Commerce Department's 2010 assessment used a deliberately broad definition. A counterfeit electronic part is one that is an unauthorized copy, does not conform to the original manufacturer's design or performance standards, was not produced by the original manufacturer or was produced by an unauthorized contractor, is an off-specification, defective, or used product sold as new or working, or carries incorrect or false markings or documentation.

The nuclear industry uses a wider label. In Regulatory Guide 1.234, the NRC distinguishes items intentionally manufactured or altered to imitate a legitimate product without the legal right to do so (counterfeit), items intentionally misrepresented with the intent to deceive (fraudulent), and items reasonably suspected of being either (suspect). The Department of Energy runs a similar program under the name suspect/counterfeit items.

Two consequences follow for plant buyers. First, a part that works today can still be counterfeit if it is a used or lower-grade unit remarked as new, and microcircuit manufacturers in the Commerce survey reported remarking as the most common counterfeit type. Second, falsified paperwork can make a genuine-looking part a fraudulent or unapproved item, and how each dataset classifies it depends on the source. The 2023 jet engine parts case discussed below was a documentation fraud.

## How Big the Trade Is

The widest measurement comes from the OECD and EUIPO. Their [Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/mapping-global-trade-in-fakes-2025_94d3b29f-en.html) report, the fourth in a series, estimates that counterfeit and pirated goods accounted for up to 2.3% of global trade in 2021, about $467 billion, and up to 4.7% of EU imports, about $117 billion. The estimate is modeled from customs seizure data supplied by the World Customs Organization, the European Commission, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In the report's seizure data, which covers 2020 and 2021, China accounted for 45% of global seizures, around 65% of seizures involved small parcels and mail, and clothing, footwear, and leather goods made up 62% of recorded seizures. The authors also flagged hazardous fakes, including automotive parts, as increasingly prevalent.

Their earlier Dangerous Fakes report (2022) put trade in selected categories of potentially dangerous counterfeits at almost $75 billion in 2019, 16% of the counterfeit trade, with automotive spare parts among the most frequent categories.

U.S. seizure data is more current. CBP's November 2025 release states that the agency seized nearly 79 million counterfeit items in fiscal 2025 with a combined manufacturer's suggested retail price of more than $7.3 billion, had the goods been genuine. CBP's [Intellectual Property Rights Seizure Statistics, Fiscal Year 2024](https://cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/IntellectualPropertyRightsSeizureStatisticsFiscalYear2024%20FINAL.pdf) report shows the trend: 10.4 million items in fiscal 2020, 32.3 million in fiscal 2024, with the MSRP of seized goods rising from about $1.3 billion to $5.4 billion.

Two features of the fiscal 2024 data matter for industrial readers. China and Hong Kong were the two largest sources by quantity, together about 28 million of the 32.3 million items. In fiscal 2024, most IPR seizures in the cargo environment involved de minimis shipments, the low-value parcel channel.

That regime has since changed. CBP suspended duty-free de minimis treatment for shipments from all countries effective August 29, 2025, under a July 30, 2025 executive order. Historical seizure data illustrate the enforcement challenge of small-parcel trade; they do not establish the counterfeit rate among industrial parts bought online.

## Where Industrial Parts Appear in the Numbers

Seizure statistics are organized by broad product category, so industrial parts are easy to miss. CBP's reports list ten health, safety, and security commodities. In fiscal 2025, the combined Automotive/Aerospace category accounted for 33,766 seized items with an MSRP of about $5.5 million, seventh among the ten, down from 231,901 items and $9.1 million in fiscal 2024; a September 2026 USPTO presentation reproduces the fiscal 2025 table.

The category does not encompass every industrial part. Consumer electronics, which can include components, accounted for 727,307 items in fiscal 2024.

The incident data is where industrial parts show up in force. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security surveyed 387 organizations for its [Defense Industrial Base Assessment: Counterfeit Electronics](https://media.bis.gov/media/documents/final-counterfeit-electronics-report2.pdf), published in January 2010: 83 component manufacturers, 98 distributors, 32 circuit board assemblers, 121 prime and subcontractors, and 53 Department of Defense organizations. The survey was mandatory under the Defense Production Act and covered 2005 through 2008.

Thirty-nine percent of participants encountered counterfeit electronics during those four years. Detected incidents rose from 3,868 in 2005 to 9,356 in 2008, where an incident is a single encounter that could involve one part or a thousand. The report concluded that all elements of the supply chain had been directly affected, and that even the most reliable sources had found counterfeits in their inventories.

The distribution channel mattered. Among distributors, 44 of 53 unauthorized distributors and brokers encountered counterfeits, against 10 of 45 authorized distributors. Even so, 21% of affected component manufacturers identified an authorized distributor as having sold counterfeit versions of their product, and the survey points to customer returns and buybacks placed into stock without testing as pathways. About 94% of the counterfeit incidents reported by discrete-component manufacturers involved parts still in production, so obsolescence explains only part of the problem.

The Senate Armed Services Committee's year-long investigation, released May 21, 2012, examined the same supply chain from the buyer's side. The [committee's report](https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/press-releases/senate-armed-services-committee-releases-report-on-counterfeit-electronic-parts) identified about 1,800 cases of suspect counterfeit parts in 2009 and 2010, involving more than 1 million individual parts supplied by more than 650 companies. The committee traced well over 100 cases back through the supply chain, and more than 70% of those traced suspect parts led to China.

In the nuclear sector, the NRC's inspector general reported in February 2022 that counterfeit parts had been found in valves, bearings, circuit breakers, pipe fittings, and structural steel, citing the Electric Power Research Institute. That list is close to a plant storeroom's inventory.

## What Counterfeit Parts Do in a Plant

### Electrical equipment

The NRC's Information Notice 2008-04, issued April 7, 2008, described three Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls of counterfeit molded-case circuit breakers labeled as Square D, manufactured in China and distributed between 2003 and 2006. The breakers could fail to trip when overloaded, posing a fire hazard. A fourth recall followed on May 27, 2008: CPSC release 08-286 covered about 371,000 counterfeit breakers sold through electrical distributors nationwide for $3 to $23 each, with no incidents or injuries reported.

Three nuclear plants had bought Square D breakers in the affected period. Oconee and McGuire confirmed theirs were genuine. Catawba could not authenticate four breakers and removed them from stock, and the NRC said it was unaware of counterfeit breakers installed in safety-related applications.

The same notice reported a counterfeit 5-inch Ladish stop check valve that ran for eight months in a non-safety-related stator cooling water system at Hatch Unit 2 before it was discovered. A second counterfeit valve was found in the warehouse.

### Mechanical and structural parts

The NRC inspector general's [special inquiry into counterfeit, fraudulent, and suspect items](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml2204/ml22040a111.pdf) reported evidence of such items in use at an operating plant: nine corrective action reports coded as counterfeit or fraudulent, three with use confirmed.

According to an account in the report, an emergency service water pump shaft snapped after a short time in service, and the licensee's root cause evaluation found counterfeit material. At another plant, the report described evidence of defective repairs and premature failures among about 15 safety-related temperature instruments.

NRC staff responded in March and April 2022. They concluded there were no immediate safety concerns from the information they reviewed, and that the regulatory framework provides reasonable assurance that such hazards are prevented or mitigated. They also said confidentiality prevented them from reviewing the specific examples in the inquiry, so those examples stand as the inspector general's accounts.

Counterfeit fasteners have a documented history extending to the 1980s. GAO's 2001 report on the Fastener Quality Act recounts the House subcommittee investigation of that decade: the Defense Industrial Supply Center found more than 30 million counterfeit fasteners in its inventory, and Army depots held another 2.6 million. NASA found substandard fasteners in space shuttle equipment, and the Air Force found substandard flight-safety-critical fasteners in stock.

The subcommittee concluded that failures of substandard and often counterfeit fasteners may have caused deaths and injuries. The Fastener Quality Act was signed on November 16, 1990.

### Electronic components

Microcircuit manufacturers in the Commerce survey reported that the most common counterfeit was a used part remarked as higher-grade new product. In the report's words, such a part may work but will not operate at the level of the higher-grade part, and may fail under stress that would be expected under normal conditions. For discrete components, fake non-working product and working copies of original designs led the list.

The Senate investigation showed where those parts end up. The Missile Defense Agency said that if suspect counterfeit devices on THAAD mission computers had failed, the missile itself would likely have failed. Suspect parts in electromagnetic interference filters for SH-60B helicopters changed hands five times before the subcontractor bought them. In one case, a supplier in China sent 18 sample memory chips for testing, then sold more than ten thousand chips that the buyer accepted without additional independent laboratory testing.

### Paperwork

A well-documented aviation case was a documentation fraud. On September 21, 2023, the FAA issued [Unapproved Parts Notification 2023-AAE-EHL-20230801-713](https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/safety/programs/sups/upn/2023-AAE-EHL-20230801-713). It found that AOG Technics, a London distributor that held no FAA production approval, had sold GE CF6 engine bushings to a maintenance provider with falsified FAA Forms 8130-3, the airworthiness release document. One tell was the part description: the forms said "Bushing" where GE's own terminology is "BUSHING SHRD (IGV)."

The FAA recommended that any such bushings be removed from service and quarantined. EASA and the UK Civil Aviation Authority had issued suspected unapproved parts notices in August 2023 covering CFM56 engine parts from the same distributor. The UK Serious Fraud Office opened its investigation on October 31, 2023 and carried out a search and arrest that December.

AOG Technics director Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala pleaded guilty to fraudulent trading in December 2025 and was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison on February 23, 2026. The sentencing remarks put losses at £39.3 million, based on information from some, but not all, of the affected airlines and aviation companies, with lost future business excluded. That is a case-specific estimate, not an average.

For a plant buyer, the lesson transfers directly: a certificate of conformance is only as good as the process that verifies it with the issuer.

## Why the Reported Numbers Understate the Problem

Every incident count above depends on someone reporting. The Commerce survey found that 60% of component manufacturers did not know which federal authorities to notify, and that 88% of those that had encountered counterfeits did not report to the Government-Industry Data Exchange Program (GIDEP).

Component manufacturers reported 7 incidents to federal agencies in 2005 and about 235 in 2008, a small fraction of the thousands detected.

The Senate committee found the same gap from the other direction. Against its 1,800 cases, only 271 reports were submitted to GIDEP during all of 2009 and 2010, and the vast majority of the cases appear to have gone unreported to the Defense Department or criminal authorities. In each of the three cases the committee examined in depth, the department was unaware that counterfeit parts had been installed until the committee asked.

GAO's [2016 report on counterfeit parts](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-16-236) counted 526 suspect counterfeit reports in GIDEP for fiscal years 2011 through 2015, submitted primarily by contractors; that span includes the 2013 mandate for defense agencies and the 2014 reporting requirements for covered defense contractors and their electronic-parts subcontractors.

GAO's 2016 findings: no oversight to ensure agencies reported, no standard for how much evidence was needed, and reports often restricted to government users so industry never saw them. The Defense Logistics Agency, GAO noted, may have been underreporting.

The Defense Department implemented all four of GAO's recommendations, the last through a 2022 instruction on GIDEP oversight. Implementation shows the gaps were addressed; it does not show that underreporting ended.

The nuclear sector has a similar blind spot. The NRC inspector general found that three of four sampled licensees did not track counterfeit items in their corrective action programs, and that nuclear industry groups had reported fewer than 10 potential cases since 2016. The inquiry set that count against the more than 100 incidents DOE staff identified at DOE facilities in fiscal 2021, a different population with its own reporting routes.

The inquiry also described the NRC as not requiring licensees to report such items except in extraordinary circumstances. NRC guidance revised in 2024 (Regulatory Guide 1.234 Revision 1 and Regulatory Issue Summary 2015-08 Revision 1) sets out the framework without adding requirements. Where Part 21 applies, counterfeit or fraudulent conditions that constitute deviations must be evaluated for whether they could create a substantial safety hazard. Reporting depends on the applicable criteria; safety-information and reactor-event reporting rules may also apply.

## Calculate Your Own Counterfeit Incident Cost

No source reviewed for this guide publishes a representative cost per counterfeit incident, and the surveys above did not collect one. Your own number comes from inputs you already track.

Count each cost once, use loaded labor rates, and use your plant's own downtime cost per hour. If that rate already includes labor or scrap, leave those out of the other lines.

**Gross incident cost = P + T + R + D + C**

**Net excess cost = gross incident cost − B − F**

* **P**, purchase cost of the suspect lot: parts bought that can no longer be used, whether installed or still on the shelf.
* **T**, detection and testing: laboratory authentication fees plus engineering and quality hours spent on the investigation.
* **R**, removal and replacement: labor hours to pull installed units and fit genuine ones, the genuine replacement parts for the whole lot, and any expedited freight.
* **D**, downtime: hours lost to the failure or the planned removal, multiplied by your downtime cost per hour. Enter zero only if no attributable downtime occurred; a lot rejected at receiving can still delay a job.
* **C**, consequential damage: collateral damage to the machine, scrapped product, warranty or recall exposure, and regulatory reporting costs where they apply, each counted once.
* **B**, the baseline: the comparable cost you would have incurred without the incident over the same period, which for a replaced lot is the price of the genuine parts.
* **F**, refunds, chargebacks, insurance recoveries, or other amounts that offset the loss, over the same period.

Worked example (hypothetical, for illustration only). A plant buys 40 bearings from an online broker at $85 each instead of $140 from the authorized distributor. One fails three weeks after installation on a critical pump. The lot is quarantined, and laboratory authentication confirms the bearings are counterfeit.

* P = 40 × $85 = $3,400
* T = $1,200 laboratory fee + 8 engineering hours × $95 = $1,960
* R = 12 installed bearings × 3 hours × $75 = $2,700 labor, plus 40 genuine bearings × $140 = $5,600, plus $350 expedited freight = $8,650
* D = 6 hours × $4,000 per hour = $24,000
* C = damaged shaft and seal, $3,200

Gross incident cost: $3,400 + $1,960 + $8,650 + $24,000 + $3,200 = $41,210, which includes both the original purchase and the genuine replacement lot. Buying the genuine lot at the outset would have cost $5,600 (B), and assuming no refunds or other recoveries (F = 0), the net excess cost is $41,210 − $5,600 = $35,610.

The broker's price saved $55 per bearing, or $2,200 on the lot. In this illustration the excess cost is about 16 times the saving, and the downtime line alone is 11 times the saving. Your ratio will differ; the structure of the arithmetic will not.

Two refinements. If the suspect lot never reached the floor, D and C may be zero, but testing, replacement procurement, freight, and schedule disruption remain, which is still the strongest argument for testing before stocking. Record removal and reinstallation in R, including an engine removal or similar teardown a regulator requires. Record separately incurred regulatory evaluation and reporting costs, such as a Part 21 evaluation, in C, excluding amounts already included in T or R.

## Claims to Handle With Care

Several large figures circulate alongside the ones above and should be quoted with their provenance attached.

The projection that counterfeiting and piracy would drain $4.2 trillion from the world economy by 2022 comes from a 2017 Frontier Economics report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce's BASCAP initiative and the International Trademark Association. It extended the OECD's trade estimate to include domestically produced fakes, digital piracy, and wider economic effects, and it was a forecast, not a measurement. It is an industry-commissioned projection and is not comparable to the OECD's 2021 trade figure.

The claim that counterfeits cost U.S. semiconductor companies more than $7.5 billion a year in lost revenue, with nearly 11,000 jobs, is a Semiconductor Industry Association estimate quoted in the Senate committee's 2012 release. It is the industry's own figure, and the release does not supply the estimate's method.

Bearing manufacturers and their trade association publish tonnage from raids and destruction events, which are useful as a maker's own account of what it seized. Some industry materials go further: a June 2016 press release from bearing maker NTN-SNR cites 3,500 industrial accidents a year and 4.5 billion euros of annual damage from counterfeits in industry, without stating a method. Treat such figures as industry claims until a method appears.

Finally, the Commerce Department's 39% and 9,356 figures describe 2005 to 2008. They come from a mandatory survey of five electronics supply-chain segments, which is why they are still quoted, but they are not current measurements.

## How to Keep Counterfeits Out

A plant checklist adapted from the Commerce Department's 2010 best practices:

* Buy from original manufacturers or their authorized distributors where possible, and require traceability when buying from independent distributors or brokers.
* Keep a trusted supplier list and an untrusted one.
* Use escrow to hold payment during testing.
* Screen and test parts before they enter inventory, including returns and buybacks.
* Control rejected stock and manufacturing scrap; destroy items designated for destruction only after applicable evidence-retention and disposition requirements are satisfied.
* Keep an internal database of suspect parts, and report suspect and confirmed cases to federal authorities and industry associations.

A suspect item already in hand is handled differently from scrap. The Department of Energy's Suspect/Counterfeit Items Resource Handbook, DOE-HDBK-1221-2024, separates evaluation, reporting, and disposition: segregate the item, retain the records and the item as evidence, and destroy it only after the investigation and reporting are complete and the item has been released. The handbook also carries a legacy headmark list for fasteners and indicator checklists, technical guidance to adapt to the application.

The NRC's guidance from 1989, restated in Information Notice 2008-04, names three characteristics of an effective program: engineering involvement in procurement and acceptance, effective source inspection, receipt inspection, and testing, and engineering-based dedication of commercial-grade items for safety-related use.

Standards and clauses exist for the contract side. SAE AS5553 covers counterfeit avoidance for organizations that procure and integrate electrical, electronic, and electromechanical parts, AS6174 addresses materiel authenticity more broadly, AS6081 covers independent distributors of those electronic parts, and AS6496 covers authorized distributors. Where it applies to a contract or is flowed down to a subcontract, DFARS 252.246-7007 requires a counterfeit electronic part detection and avoidance system, including reporting and quarantining of suspect as well as confirmed counterfeit parts.

Reporting channels include GIDEP for government and industry participants, the FAA's Suspected Unapproved Parts program for aviation articles, and CBP's e-Allegations portal and the National IPR Coordination Center for suspected imports.

## How We Evaluated

Independent editorial analysis based on publicly available government data, peer-reviewed research, and the original pages behind widely quoted benchmarks.

Reliable does not sell scheduling software, staffing services, or consulting and has no commercial interest in routing readers toward any particular vendor. Reliable does not accept payment for rankings. Vendors may sponsor enhanced listings with additional detail, but editorial rankings are independent. [Read our editorial policy](https://reliamag.com/editorial-policy/).

For this guide we read the OECD and EUIPO reports, CBP's fiscal 2024 statistics report and its fiscal 2025 release, the full Commerce Department assessment, the Senate committee's release and conclusions, the GAO reports, the NRC information notice, inspector general inquiry, staff responses, and 2024 guidance, the FAA notification, and the UK court's sentencing remarks. Industry and vendor figures are identified as such wherever they appear.

## Honest Limitations

The OECD figures are statistical estimates built from customs seizure records, and the authors describe them as upper bounds. They cover all product types, and the reports publish no separate total for industrial maintenance parts.

CBP's data counts what was seized, not what got through, and values goods at the manufacturer's suggested retail price as if the goods were genuine. Its categories are consumer-oriented, and the Automotive/Aerospace line combines two sectors.

The fiscal 2025 totals in this guide come from CBP's November 2025 release, and the fiscal 2025 Automotive/Aerospace figures come from CBP's fiscal 2025 report as reproduced in a September 2026 USPTO presentation. The country and transport breakdowns come from the fiscal 2024 report, whose narrative says MSRP rose 415% over five years; its own chart values give about $1.3 billion to $5.4 billion, so this guide quotes the dollar figures.

The Commerce survey describes 2005 through 2008, counts suspected and confirmed counterfeits together, and defines an incident so that one encounter could involve one part or a thousand. The 2008 counts were partly estimated because the year had not ended when the survey ran. The Senate figures cover defense electronics in 2009 and 2010. The GIDEP counts measure reporting behavior as much as counterfeiting.

The NRC inspector general sampled one plant in each of the agency's four regions, and NRC staff could not review the inquiry's specific examples, so those remain the inspector general's accounts. The DOE figure is a staff count that includes incidents outside DOE's formal reporting system. The CPSC recall count is units recalled, not the number installed.

The worked example in the calculator is hypothetical. The inputs are illustrative plant figures, and no survey in this guide collected per-incident costs.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How large is the global trade in counterfeit goods?

The OECD and EUIPO estimate that counterfeit and pirated goods accounted for up to 2.3% of global trade in 2021, about $467 billion, and up to 4.7% of EU imports, about $117 billion. The estimate is modeled from customs seizure data, in which China accounted for 45% of seizures. The report gives no separate estimate for industrial maintenance parts.

### How many counterfeit items does U.S. customs seize each year?

CBP seized nearly 79 million counterfeit items in fiscal 2025 with a manufacturer's suggested retail price above $7.3 billion, up from 32.3 million items and $5.4 billion in fiscal 2024 and 10.4 million items in fiscal 2020. In fiscal 2025, the combined automotive and aerospace category accounted for 33,766 of the seized items, seventh among the ten health, safety, and security categories CBP lists, down from 231,901 in fiscal 2024.

### What kinds of industrial parts get counterfeited?

Government sources document counterfeit circuit breakers, valves, pump shafts, bearings, pipe fittings, structural steel, fasteners, and electronic components including microprocessors and memory. Microcircuit manufacturers in the Commerce Department survey reported that the most common counterfeit was a used part remarked as higher-grade new product. The FAA's 2023 notification on jet engine bushings involved genuine-looking parts sold with falsified airworthiness forms.

### How often do companies encounter counterfeit parts?

The Commerce Department's mandatory survey found that 39% of 387 participating organizations encountered counterfeit electronics between 2005 and 2008, with detected incidents rising from 3,868 to 9,356 a year. The Senate Armed Services Committee identified about 1,800 cases involving more than a million suspect parts in the defense supply chain in 2009 and 2010. The NRC inspector general reported that Department of Energy staff identified more than 100 counterfeit, fraudulent, and suspect item incidents at DOE facilities in fiscal 2021.

### Why are counterfeit part incidents underreported?

The Commerce survey found that 60% of component manufacturers did not know which federal authority to contact and that 88% of those that found counterfeits did not report to GIDEP. Only 271 GIDEP reports were filed in 2009 and 2010 against the Senate committee's 1,800 cases, and GAO counted 526 for fiscal 2011 through 2015. For nuclear licensees, reporting depends on the applicable Part 21, safety-information, and reactor-event criteria; not every suspected counterfeit discovery is independently reportable.

### What does a counterfeit part incident cost a plant?

No source reviewed for this guide publishes a representative per-incident cost. The gross cost is the suspect lot plus testing, removal and genuine replacement, downtime, and consequential damage; the net excess cost subtracts what the genuine parts would have cost anyway and any recoveries. In the hypothetical example in this guide, a $2,200 saving on 40 broker-sourced bearings became a $41,210 gross cost and a $35,610 excess cost once one failed on a critical pump, with downtime the largest line.

## Related Guides

* [MRO and Spare Parts Inventory Statistics: Stockouts, Accuracy, Costs](https://reliamag.com/topics/guides/mro-spare-parts-inventory-statistics)
* [Bearing Failure Cause Statistics: What the Numbers Show](https://reliamag.com/topics/guides/bearing-failure-cause-statistics)
* [The Real Cost of Poor Quality: Scrap, Rework, and Returns](https://reliamag.com/topics/articles/cost-of-poor-quality-scrap-rework-returns)
* [Electric Motor Failure Statistics: Causes, Failure Rates, and Survey Data](https://reliamag.com/topics/guides/electric-motor-failure-statistics)
* [Equipment Breakdown Insurance Loss Statistics: Causes and Cost Shares](https://reliamag.com/topics/guides/equipment-breakdown-insurance-statistics)

## Sources

* OECD and European Union Intellectual Property Office: [Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025: Global Trends and Enforcement Challenges](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/mapping-global-trade-in-fakes-2025_94d3b29f-en.html) (May 7, 2025; 2021 trade estimates, with a seizure analysis covering 2020 to 2021; the May 2025 press release gives the $467 billion, 45%, 65%, and 62% figures) and [Dangerous Fakes: Trade in Counterfeit Goods that Pose Health, Safety and Environmental Risks](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/dangerous-fakes_117e352b-en.html) (March 2022; 2019 data for selected product categories).
* U.S. Customs and Border Protection: [Intellectual Property Rights Seizure Statistics, Fiscal Year 2024](https://cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/IntellectualPropertyRightsSeizureStatisticsFiscalYear2024%20FINAL.pdf) (publication 3964-0125, January 2025; five-year quantity and MSRP, top countries, transport modes, health, safety, and security commodities), [Intellectual Property Rights Seizure Statistics, Fiscal Year 2025](https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2026-05/ipr_seizure_stats_fiscal_year_2025_pbrb_5471.0326.pdf) (publication 5471-0326, 2026; its health, safety, and security table is reproduced on slide 17 of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office presentation [USPTO Hour: Trademarks and anti-counterfeiting](https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/tm-uspto-hour-trademarks-september-2026.pdf), September 2026), the national media release "CBP reminds shoppers: beware of counterfeits this holiday season" (November 12, 2025; fiscal 2025 totals), and the Cargo Systems Messaging Service bulletin of August 2025 on the suspension of de minimis treatment.
* U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security: [Defense Industrial Base Assessment: Counterfeit Electronics](https://media.bis.gov/media/documents/final-counterfeit-electronics-report2.pdf) (Office of Technology Evaluation, January 2010; 387 organizations, 2005 to 2008; executive summary, chapters II and III, and best practices).
* U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services: [Senate Armed Services Committee Releases Report on Counterfeit Electronic Parts](https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/press-releases/senate-armed-services-committee-releases-report-on-counterfeit-electronic-parts) (May 21, 2012; release and conclusions for the report Inquiry into Counterfeit Electronic Parts in the Department of Defense Supply Chain).
* U.S. Government Accountability Office: [Counterfeit Parts: DOD Needs to Improve Reporting and Oversight to Reduce Supply Chain Risk](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-16-236) (GAO-16-236, February 2016; GIDEP reports fiscal 2011 to 2015; recommendation status) and [Quality Assurance: The Fastener Quality Act's Small-Lot Exemption](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-01-719.pdf) (GAO-01-719, June 2001; background on the House subcommittee findings).
* U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: [Special Inquiry into Counterfeit, Fraudulent, and Suspect Items in Operating Nuclear Power Plants](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml2204/ml22040a111.pdf) (Office of the Inspector General, OIG Case No. 20-022, February 9, 2022), the NRC staff responses of March 4, 2022 (ML22060A153) and [April 22, 2022](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2208/ML22080A111.pdf) (ML22080A111), [Regulatory Issue Summary 2015-08, Revision 1, Oversight of Counterfeit, Fraudulent, and Suspect Items in the Nuclear Industry](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2418/ML24184B841.pdf) (October 5, 2024), [Regulatory Guide 1.234, Revision 1, Evaluating Deviations and Reporting Defects and Noncompliance](https://downloads.regulations.gov/NRC-2023-0167-0005/content.pdf) (March 2024; definitions in section C.4), and Information Notice 2008-04, Counterfeit Parts Supplied to Nuclear Power Plants (April 7, 2008; ML080790266).
* Federal Aviation Administration: [Unapproved Parts Notification 2023-AAE-EHL-20230801-713](https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/safety/programs/sups/upn/2023-AAE-EHL-20230801-713) (September 21, 2023; GE CF6 bushing part number 1856M94P01 sold by AOG Technics with falsified FAA Forms 8130-3). Case outcome: UK Serious Fraud Office case page for AOG Technics Ltd ([gov.uk](http://gov.uk)) and the sentencing remarks in R v Jose Zamora, Southwark Crown Court, February 23, 2026 ([judiciary.uk](http://judiciary.uk)).