Fraudulent Products Pose a Serious Threat to Small Businesses

There’s a lot on the minds of small business entrepreneurs. One of them shouldn’t be trusting that their technology investments are trustworthy and functional.

Budgets for small businesses are tight, especially during the recovery from the pandemic. It’s reasonable that they could be influenced by an apparently lower-cost version of a Cisco product that they saw online, given that they must keep track of every dollar spent and guarantee that they get the expected bang for their buck. Why pay more for a smart switch from a reputable partner when you can get one for a fraction of the cost on another website?

Cisco products have unfortunately found their way into the digital marketplace as counterfeit, pirated, or unapproved copies. In addition to losing income for Cisco and our partners, as well as damage to our brand and relationships, it also means lost value, if not worse, for our customers. Unauthorized products, whether obtained willingly or inadvertently, can cause significant harm to a small business when margins of error are low to none. Fraudulent goods may be unreliable, of poor quality, or fail to perform as intended.

Then, when they stop working, they aren’t covered by warranty or service assistance, leaving the small business owner completely stranded. What entrepreneur has time to troubleshoot their technology when they’re busy with payroll, scheduling, customer service, and the other countless duties that fill their days?

Furthermore, these items may jeopardize network and data integrity, posing a risk to safety compliance. It’s simple to envision that if a small business’s client data was hacked, the customers’ faith in the company would be irreversibly damaged. Imagine the proprietary recipes of a beloved bakery being revealed, posing an existential threat in and of itself. In this way, a minor issue—a phoney product—emerges into a large issue, resulting in significant costs and extra difficulties and heartaches for the already stressed-out small business owner.

The Struggle Against Fraud

For our small company customers, Cisco is committed to eliminating these risks. We’ve put a lot of money into our Brand Protection team, which works around the clock to battle these threats. To begin, we’ve built cutting-edge security safeguards into all of our products.

There are several ways Cisco makes it easy to tell if you’ve got the real stuff or an imitation, from carton labels to holographic markers like those used in passports and currency. For added peace of mind, we urge partners and customers to visit our BuyRight site and verify their purchase by entering the serial numbers on the device to see if it is Cisco-guaranteed.

Second, we work closely with our ecosystem of partners to ensure that they don’t end up with counterfeit Cisco goods that harm their revenue or reputation. Our Brand Protection team works with governments and customs agencies all over the world to discover and seize counterfeits, as my colleague Oliver Tuszik reports. We also examine and scrutinize new partner registrations on a daily basis to guarantee that each of our partners complies fully with local and national trade rules.

Small Business is Cisco’s Big Love

Naturally, our dedication to the integrity of our goods applies to all of our customers and partners, but we know that the risk of fraud is disproportionately high for small business owners. Small firms cannot afford to lose value, time, or business because of these concerns. We endeavour to do everything we can as a large firm that cares about small businesses to mitigate these risks and ensure that our customers #BuyRight with Cisco, every time.