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A 32-year-old healthcare facility employee with the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center building on East 53rd Street was busted and arrested for apparently stealing more than a million dollars worth of toner cartridges over a three year period and selling them to the black market.

Marque Gumbs, who earned $37,000 annually from the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, allegedly lived the high-life right after selling the printer toner cartridges to the underground black market. He padded his checking account with $149,048 worth of cash deposits as well as paid for a BMW X6 for $50,500 in cash. based on court documents.

Gumbs was arraigned in NYC, Manhattan Criminal Court Wednesday and charged with grand larceny. He is being kept in jail and held on a $100,000 bail.

“He kept a fairly low profile, but the way he dressed was a little flashy,” a neighbor of his at the Trump Plaza in New Rochelle told The Wall Street Journal. “You could tell he wore fancy clothes but he himself was low key as a person.”

Gumbs supposedly worked as a receiving clerk at the hospital’s outpatient campus on East 53rd Street. The position offered him to manage control over ordering, receiving and stocking the printer ink cartridges.

He ordered $1.2 million worth of printer cartridges between October 2009 and August 2010 which were not compatible with any of the inkjet printers at his facility, the complaint stated. Gumbs ordered an overall total of approximately $3.8 million worth of ink cartridges while he was employed by Sloan-Kettering.

Gumbs allegedly asked the supply truck to meet him around the street rather than within the building and after that stashed the products inside the garbage bay area, based on the court papers.

A spokesperson for Sloan-Kettering said that Gumbs began doing work at the cancer center in 1999 but has since been terminated.

Printer ink and toner manufacturers like HP, Canon, and Xerox make a huge profit on the mark up of their products.  Leveraging the high price tag for printer consumable, scrupulous people have taken original manufacturers’ products that have been used already, remanufactured and refilled them, and resell them as new and original.  They collect or buy the used cartridges for pennies on the dollar and sell them at the original OEM prices making a huge profit.  Most of these types of counterfeit consumables have been distributed and produced in Mexico, South America or Asia.

At InkCloners.com, our manufacturers collect empty cartridges through legitimate means like the Ecycle Group.  We then thoroughly test, clean, refill and test print our cartridges to make sure you have a fully functional cloned product.  Our brand then gets packaged as a compatible or remanufactured printer cartridge.

If you detect that you have received counterfeit cartridges, call the manufacturer and report the issue.  They should launch an investigation into the matter.  Rest assured that when you buy from InkCloners.com, you are buying legitimate cloned products that meet or exceed the original manufacturers’ specifications.  While we do our best to package everything properly, occasionally there are bumps in the road we can’t avoid.  Fear not though, that our customer support team is available M-F 9am-5pm EST to resolve any issue that arises and we offer a full refund if you are totally not satisfied with our printer cartridges.

The simple answer is yes,….. if the cartridges do not infringe on the manufacturer’s patent and design technology.

In a recent case, Chinese and Taiwanese competitors stole patented printer cartridge components from HP’s factory in Singapore by hijacking a truck carrying HP parts.  They then sold more than 300,000 of those counterfeit ink cartridges on Amazon.com and Craigslist.

HP bought some of the cartridges from Amazon.com, and then used their internal tracking database to cross-reference ID numbers on the components.  HP technicians found that the cartridges had a genuine HP printhead that came from HP lots from Malaysia and a non-HP cartridge body that closely resembled a genuine HP cartridge body.  They knew, from the assembly numbers stamped on the cartridges, that HP had never been assembled those cartridges.  The then identified that the printer cartridges were packaged in a clear plastic wrap with a “Mipo” labeled box.  From this, forensic investigation, HP came to the conclusion that the culprits were Microjet Technology (of Taiwan) Mipo Technology (of Hong Kong and mainland China), and their U.S. affiliates, including SinoTime Technologies (of Florida).

Boy, these guys are in big trouble.