How to Clone Anything
The easiest way to clone a product is to use a "ghost shift": A factory contracted to make legitimate goods moves to 24-hour operation, churning out copies—some made with inferior materials, and others exactly the same, designed to be sold on the black market—from midnight to morning.
The only problem with ghost shifts is that they can't run full time. In the mid-'90s, developers began constructed from the same blueprints legitimate manufacturers used to launch their ventures. Sometimes the plans were sold by managers at the genuine facilities. Other times, local officials and organized crime conspired to create a second set of blueprints.
Cloners look for opportunity first, and manufacturers often give it to them, often in the form of a hot product that is released in a limited number of markets. Desire spreads worldwide, and the cloners are ready to fill any gaps that emerge in supply or distribution. (That's what's happening now with the iPhone, which for nearly a year will be sold in North America only.)
The cloners start by deciding what phones would be most profitable to clone. They then learn everything they can about the device. They attend trade shows, furiously snapping photos of not-yet-released products until someone notices and shoos them away. They will be first in line to buy the new product whenever it hits stores. And they will look for shortcuts, such as a patent filed in China that can act as the beginning of an actual production guide.
The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.) Both processes take about a month. By then, ancillary items—plastic casings, accessories, manuals and packaging—are ready as well. Full production begins at another factory, one that is already building phones, within about eight weeks from the time the engineers are hired. After a run of about 30,000 units, the cloners move the operation to a new facility in order to avoid detection.
