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Into the Inkwell

One of the fake cartridges was among 20 that we ordered from various vendors online; the other two were among 45 bought at retail stores. (Four other cartridges that we purchased online, although genuine, had problems: One had expired, another was only half full and didn't come in a box, and the remaining two were intended for sale in Asia.)

We also spoke with several people who, according to police records, had unknowingly purchased counterfeit ink from Sattar's company, Multi-Tech (no relation to the telephony equipment manufacturer Multi-Tech Systems). Nearly all said they initially thought they were getting a great deal. But most complained of illegible printouts, clogged ink jet printers that took hours to clean, cartridges that didn't work, or broken printers that the customers had to scrap. Considerably fewer buyers of counterfeit ink had no problems.

"This stuff was nasty," reports Terry Schumacher, a machine shop engineer residing in Mesa, Arizona. He bought eight cartridges for his Epson Stylus Photo 1280 printer for $150--about half what they'd normally cost--through EBay. But he wound up discarding the cartridges when one of them "spit ink everywhere" after he installed it and tried to make prints. "This cartridge was a flawless copy of the real thing. The only problem is, the cartridge worked like crap," Schumacher says.

Gigi DiGiacomo, an agricultural economist from Minnetonka, Minnesota, says that counterfeit ink ruined the printheads of her Epson Stylus Photo 825 printer. "We... spent 4 hours trying to fix that printer," she says. Eventually, she and her husband got a new printer from Epson. DiGiacomo paid $133--about 33 percent below the normal price--for the ten cartridges that she purchased online. "They were sealed and had holograms," she says. "I never thought for a minute they were fake."

Similarly, some owners of Brother multifunction printers never suspected that cartridges bought from a regional office-supply chain were bogus. When their machines began to fail, many owners blamed the hardware and sent the devices back to Brother.

"We figured out [that] the problem wasn't with the machine, it was the counterfeit ink cartridges," says Brother's marketing director Matt Hahn. Brother yanked the cartridges from the shelves, but the company won't say where the incident occurred or how many customers were affected.

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