Photos: Shimano Stacked cardboard boxes in a dimly lit space, some with flaps open, revealing green-packaged products inside. The boxes appear slightly worn and are arranged haphazardly on a concrete floor. “Y’all gotta stop buying aliexpress knockoff parts.”
This r/MTB subreddit thread caught my attention earlier this year, though it wasn’t the initial post warning buyers away from knock-off parts that I found interesting. Instead, it was the lack of comments from riders saying they had been harmed by fake bike parts. (The OP uses the terms knock-off and fake interchangeably, though, as I’ll explain, these are two different things.)
Plenty of Redditors voiced their agreement with the original statement, but it seemed just as many were happy with their purchases. Perhaps most surprisingly, as far as I can tell, none of the 500+ commenters reported being hurt, at least physically, by a fake bike part, as the OP seemed to warn might happen.
So I decided to check with Singletracks readers and legitimate parts suppliers to understand the risks involved in buying counterfeit parts, knowingly or otherwise. What I learned is that buying counterfeit parts can and does harm riders and suppliers alike — if not physically, then at least economically. And while preventing counterfeit parts from being bought and sold online is difficult, it is getting easier. What’s the difference between a knock-off and a counterfeit?
Mountain bikers tend to use the words counterfeit and knock-off similarly, but it’s important to note these are not the same. A counterfeit […]
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