I first picked up on this at the booth for a company named Onanoff. The company owner, Petur Olafsson, was giving me his standard product pitch when a Chinese man with a camera crept up to the booth and started taking very close-up photos of a speaker case Petur designed for the iPad Air.

Onanoff
"Blasphemy! If your iPad was meant to have a kickstand, God -- er, Steve Jobs would have put one on it!"

Petur got pissed, and shooed this iPhone-wielding James Bond away. He explained that this was not an isolated incident. Similar men had been coming up to his booth all trade-show long, taking detailed pictures and then scampering off, like some kind of weird electronics-based sexual predators. Their badges identified them as "Exhibitors" and not "Press," and none of them ever asked him questions about his mechanical baby. It was clear to Petur that they meant to steal his brainchild.

"You put three years of your life into a product, and they rip you off."

Ridofranz/iStock/Getty Images
While you studied engineering, like a dipshit.

This set the Journalism Lobe of my brain a-tinglin', something that doesn't generally happen without a pint of hard liquor or a good solid ether binge. My camerawoman/fiance Magenta in tow, I set off down the little strip of booths nearest to the convention hall designated for Chinese exhibitors. My goal was to find anyone else who'd had a product abducted at CES.

It took about two minutes.

That thing on the bottom is the IN1CASE Juice Case. The thing above it is the same case, but made using shittier materials and sold at CES just a building away from the people who own the actual copyright. An eagle-eyed fan pointed this out to them and they went down and bought a copy. Their one consolation is that it was made with way cheaper, shittier materials than the original -- and that it cost only $5. Which is like saying, "Man, this baking soda was soooo much cheaper than the cocaine you paid for!"

But hey! At least ripping off an original product with a poorly-constructed knockoff is a time-honored capitalist tradition. If that's all I'd found, you wouldn't be reading this article. Fortunately for my ability to stay employed, things quickly got much, much weirder.

Magenta Vaughn
You are now craving soft-boiled eggs.

This is the Bass Egg. It's a nifty little gadget that turns any table or wall you set it on into a massive speaker, allowing you to carry around a lot of potential sound in a very portable package. I call it "The Library Ruiner." I met pne of the engineers behind it, got a review sample, exchanged business cards, and walked away impressed. I've seen a lot of pitches for a soul-aching number of different gadgets in my career, and most of them stand out about as much as a white dude in Portland. The Bass Egg was unique, which is why it surprised me when literally ten minutes later Magenta spotted one sitting on the shelf of Shenzhen-based trading company, Potranda's booth. It was seated on a shelf full of other (presumed) knockoffs, less than a quarter of a mile away from the actual Bass Egg's booth.

Magenta Vaughn
When you crack it open, all the circuits have evil goatees.

Portranda's employees -- none of whom spoke English -- had no answer for me when I asked what the hell was going on there. This was no cheap replica. It appeared to be the exact same product, sans branding, on sale a few hundred feet away from one of the Bass Egg engineers, Zaki Moustafa. He was incredibly surprised when I told him:

"This is crazy ... we manufacture overseas, but [Potranda] isn't our manufacturer."

Magenta Vaughn
Here's him looking over their brochure.

Unfortunately, he did not flip out and start spin-kicking dudes in the neck, but sometimes my dreams overpower my sense of reality. So how the hell did this happen? As we learned ...

But Zaki performed an autopsy on the counterfeiter's Bass Egg after the trade show, and discovered that whoever ripped him off had only gotten the outside perfect. His manufacturer was innocent. The inside was all junk -- it was like they'd taken a '69 Charger and shoved a lawnmower engine under the hood:

"They took literally every option to cut corners. For example, placing the Bluetooth module on the amplifier board (rather than keeping separate) so that they would have to use less injection-molded PCB holders. Now, since they put the Bluetooth module on the amplifier board (which is located at the same level that all the buttons are) they have the antenna (which receives the signal containing music or whatever from your phone) too far away from the top of the Bass Egg. To get around this, they literally soldered a piece of wire from the Bluetooth antenna and stuck it to the underside of the top cap with a piece of 3M tape."

Here's a picture I took of Potranda's Bass Egg of Lies next to the real Bass Egg:

Magenta Vaughn
Do not believe his blue light special of deception.

How could it look so perfect? Potranda had succeeded in making a picture-perfect replica, one so convincing that a man who was an actual Bass Egg engineer believed in its legitimacy at first glance. At first, I assumed this meant Bass Egg had fallen victim to the Michael Jordan of rippin' shit off. But the truth is that trade shows like CES are like a big red Easy button for corporate espionage:

"I'm new to the world of tech trade shows, but I was shocked at the number of people who wanted to approach the booth and document every angle of the product (as well as our product commercials) in high res photos and HD video. There is absolutely nothing stopping these guys from playing the role of 'interested customer' and walking away with their very own Bass Egg to take apart and recreate using their own factories and engineers."

"Fortunately for us", stated Bass Egg CEO, Jonathan Bouchlas, "we have just recently received our patent approval and will be able to begin taking action against counterfeiters such as this. Not all companies of our size have this luxury".

I also spoke with the Operation's Manager of Ogio, a company that makes durable backpacks for people who like to own expensive electronics and crash motorcycles. He pointed out that his company had people specifically hired to police their manufacturers, auditing to make sure no "extra" bags were shipped anywhere else. Even though the number of actual stolen and resold Ogio bags was low, there was nothing to stop Alibaba.com from selling pages worth of cheap replicas:

Alibaba.com
Not pictured above: any actual Ogio products.

It's an infuriating problem, and you should be pissed about it even if you're the sort of person who steals all their TV and movies online. Pirating media is one thing. Faking a product, and then attempting to profit from it yards away from the inventor is another. Unfortunately ...