Keeping your nose clean when the channel plays dirty

You do the right thing. You play by the rules. Then you hear about this: A North Carolina Bonnie and Clyde are charged with bilking Cisco out of $23 million by swindling them into shipping used parts to fake businesses in eight states.

And they’re just the ones who got caught.

A con that big is bound to leave a trail (though it didn’t help that one of the suspects bragged about the scheme on Classmates.com), but it’s probably not a big reach to suggest that there’s some more subtle, smaller-scale dirty tricks going on in the channel.

Corruption creates unfair competition.  How do you make staying clean pay off?