I wanted to post here about a problem our company is facing with nefarious people selling counterfeit bearings. Our company is on a mission to educate engineers (especially field engineers that interface on-site with clients) on identification of counterfeit bearings.

It seems that some people around the world take cheap substandard bearings, grind off the markings on the side of the bearings, remark them with a premium brand, and sell them at a premium price. Other times they're repackaged in boxes that are knock-offs of the original. Amusingly, sometimes the boxes have horrible misspellings! Our company has anti-counterfeit markings on our product.

I've been involved in a couple cases where we've identified counterfeit bearings and are bringing the suppliers to suit.

The best way to avoid counterfeit bearings is to buy from an approved distributor.

If you do find yourself in a situation where you've bought a counterfeit bearing, it would be a favor to the bearing company if you first help them identify the source of counterfeit bearings without tipping off the supplier. This goes a long way in helping apprehend the bogus suppliers and putting a stop to this practise.

Do you have any suggestions on what to look for to spot a counterfeit bearing (other than misspellings on the box).

You mentioned something about anti-counterfeit markings on your bearings.... what do those look like and how do we inspect them?

It varies, and I can't really give a foolproof way identifying counterfeit bearings. Besides things appearing on the box that don't look quite right you can also look at the ID markings on the side of the bearing. Counterfeiters sometimes grind the original numbers off the bearing and mark it with a different - usually premium - brand. Sometimes not all the original marks come off. Sometimes the numbers on the bearing don't match the numbers on the box. Sometimes the font is different from what the brand usually uses.

The anticounterfeit markings can only be read with special equipment by the manufacturer. I'm not sure how much I can say, so I won't go into anymore detail.

Your local manufacturer-approved distributor, field engineer, or manufacturer sales rep can help you pursue identifying any questionable bearings.

A locally know distributor's sales rep can hand deliver.

Kestas,
Many years ago, I came across a different problem, even worse than the one you discussed.
There were firms who were reconditioning old bearings and selling them as new. Hard to believe as it may sound, they actually have pretty sophisticated facilities, a sort of OEM factory. There they take ball bearings apart, grind the races to remove surface damage and reassemble the bearings with new cages. They solved the packaging problem by 'buying' discarded boxes from waste dealers.
This problem became so large that we had to buy cheaper East European bearings (Czech bearings were made in an old SKF factory) which were not 'worth' reconditioning as the price difference was not attractive. We started destroying all used bearings, and incinerated the packaging. At industry forums we preached the idea of destroying old bearings.
This problem remained for about 10 years, when the Government reduced import duties and made the practice uneconomic.
Lesson: It is hard to deal with crooked people's ingenuity.

To add a bit of what Kestas has stated, the counterfeit problem is estimated to be about 10% of bearing sales worldwide. It has not effected North America as much as other parts of the world, but that is only a matter of time as more people purchase from the internet and gray market distributors. This is a press release of a joint seizure between FAG and SKF at a distributor in Germany.

http://www.schaeffler.com/cont...etails.jsp?id=908727

The best thing to do is only buy from known sources and throughly check your purchase for anything that does not look right. Also, if the price sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

When the OEM orders their component parts are they inquiring as to where the component part company purchase their bearing for assembly of that component. Example: pump and motor. Motor came from one company pump from another. If a company is ISO certify will this help take care of this? This could get deep.

quote:

Originally posted by mbensema:
To add a bit of what Kestas has stated, the counterfeit problem is estimated to be about 10% of bearing sales worldwide. It has not effected North America as much as other parts of the world, but that is only a matter of time as more people purchase from the internet and gray market distributors. This is a press release of a joint seizure between FAG and SKF at a distributor in Germany.

http://www.schaeffler.com/cont...etails.jsp?id=908727

The best thing to do is only buy from known sources and throughly check your purchase for anything that does not look right. Also, if the price sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I can't find anyone in the bearing business that believes that 40 tons story is not a hoax. The story is full of holes and Schaeffler (FAG) will not respond to questions regarding the story.

For more see: Fake Stories as a Marketing Strategy

Sounds like it would be tough to get to the bottom of.

At the risk of delving into unproductive speculation on what none of us knows, I'll offer opinion.

If it comes down to beleiving two large reputable bearing manufacturers vs some anonymous blogger, I would give more credence to the bearing manufacturers.

Some of the bloggers' criticisms didn't ring true.

He is suspicious because the manufacturers did not name specific names in their press release. But why on earth would any large deep pocket bearing companies expose themselves to civil lawsuits by naming private individuals in one of their press releases?

He discredits the bearing manufacturers for calling old refurbished bearings counterfeit.... if they are presented as new factory bearings then they are counterfeit in my book.

None of the arguments made by the blogger were particularly convincing to me. But you just never know...

A number of years ago whilst working for a large ‘imperial’ chemical company that no longer exists, we had a catastrophic gearbox failure.
It shut the plant and production down for 3 weeks at a cost of £2.1million.
I was brought from another plant area in to manage the removal, overhaul and re-installation of the gearbox.
We had to order our bearings through a local unauthorised distributor whom I had already had bad experiences (they had sold me counterfeit SKF bearings previously)
They told us that the Timken bearings were not available in the UK and we needed to import from the USA. When the bearings eventually arrived some appeared to be in old boxes, some in plain boxes, some had the greaseproof paper missing and the whole delivery looked a mess before we even examined the bearings.
On examination I knew immediately that the bearings were second hand. I bypassed the ‘unauthorised distributor’ and went direct to Timken for advice. They immediately responded and sent a sales engineer to site.
The bearings were 18 years old and were traced back to a redundant plant in the UK!! They had never even been in the USA! They were actually older than the bearings that had failed!
In the end we got some brand new ones from Timken which arrived the next day.
I tried to have the unauthorised distributor thrown off site, I was unsuccessful even after I had all the evidence and built a case for it. I was in a responsible position for improving plant reliability and could not get one of the key influences for improving reliability changed (purchasing).
Frustrated, I left the company not long after.
This all happened 15 years ago, the plant is still running with a new owner, but sadly the same ‘unauthorised distributor’ is still selling the site their bearings.
Will we ever learn?
Cheers Gary

There are also Fake stories:

stopfakestories.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-to-fake-story.html