DEI does actively pursue sellers of DEI products through online auctions. They are very agressive about it but it runs so rampant, they claim they can't keep it all out. This is a common conversation among authorized retailers. They actually have an attorney that shuts down auctions with the help of eBay sighting intellectual rights acts. You can read about it under the help section. These people are called trans shippers and they get their product in various ways. DEI purchases their product back sometimes in the auction from sellers who have a ton of new unauthorized stuff to sell all of the sudden. They track the serial numbers down and you would be amazed at where it comes from. Something like 20% of the merchandise was refurbished but packed in stolen retail boxes (instead of the plain white REFURB ones). Like another 20% of it is stolen from the manufacturer or a retailer. And the rest slipped into the market in various ways (crooked dealers selling out the back door to large companies like Sonic Electronix, etc).

That being said, we have installed tons of this DEI Viper stuff that is brought in by customers from eBay/Amazon and we rarely have problems with it. We do carefully inspect it first and show the customers if it was a refurb product, second run, or some other crap like that and let them decide if they want us to proceed.

Where we have allot of problems is the video/navigation head units like Pioneers, Eclipses, etc. Many of those customers were TR members (feel free to share your stories!). I would definately stress to stay away from that stuff on the auction sites as they are commonly sold as new when in actuality they were used, refurbished, clearly repaired badly, etc.