I have a friend who worked for Cisco on co-op in college. He was working in support, and had access to a physical lab. One day he gets a call and is in the mid

I have a friend who worked for Cisco on co-op in college. He was working in support, and had access to a physical lab. One day he gets a call and is in the middle of debugging when he asks for a particular device's serial number. He copies it down, and looks at his desk. That device is sitting on his desk. Asks the customer to confirm, and even gets a snapshot of the physical label which matches what was said by firmware. Double Runs where the manufacturing partner builds your devices twice (or more) and sells the remaining ones on the gray market exist. You can have genuine cisco products and still not have genuine cisco products.