Twenty airbag modules arrived at Chicago O’Hare in August 2024 inside boxes that claimed to hold desktop night lights.
They were counterfeit Honda airbags, shipped from China to a used-car lot in Galloway, Ohio, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized them. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio, the same Chinese shipper sent four more batches that month, described the same cheerful way: desktop night lights, blue desktop nightlights. When agents searched JB Ohio Auto Sale in May 2025, they found more of them, some piled in a clothes hamper under a towel.
On September 4, the dealership’s owner, John Bojorquez, 35, of Columbus, pleaded guilty in federal court to trafficking in counterfeit goods. He admitted to at least 44 counterfeit airbags between August 2024 and May 2025, and he faces up to ten years. Homeland Security Investigations worked the case alongside the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General, which tells you how the government actually understands this problem.
The clothes hamper is the detail everyone will repeat. It is not the important one.
The crime was the badge, not the bomb
Bojorquez pleaded guilty under the federal counterfeit goods statute, 18 U.S.C. 2320, the same law that reaches fake handbags and knockoff watches. The prosecutable wrong was the Honda name on the box. That these devices sit a few inches from a driver’s sternum and work by igniting a pyrotechnic charge is, in strict legal terms, context. Congress did write the danger into that statute, and penalties climb steeply when counterfeit goods cause serious bodily injury or death. But the hook is still the mark.
That is not a knock on the prosecutors. It is a description of the toolbox they were handed, and Honda has said so in public. In a March 2025 column on the company’s own newsroom, a member of American Honda’s government relations staff wrote that law enforcement’s authority here rests “primarily under federal trademark law.” That is precisely why the automaker helped stand up the Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council and spent years pushing model state legislation. By Honda’s own count, 38 states have adopted it. Twelve have not, in a country where used cars cross state lines by the millions.
The federal vehicle safety code is thinner here than most people assume. 49 U.S.C. 30122 bars a manufacturer, distributor, dealer, rental company or repair business from knowingly making a safety device inoperative. It is a real prohibition, and a used-car lot installing fake restraints falls squarely inside it, but it is a civil one. Meanwhile the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards that govern airbag performance are certified by the automaker at the moment the car is built. Nobody certifies the module a shop bolts in four years and one collision later. When the government wants to send a counterfeit airbag trafficker to prison, trademark law is the door it walks through.
You can read the full article at Yahoo! Autos.