It's part of an effort to look into supply-chain fraud that could undermine weapons' integrity or endanger troops' lives, the GAO said in its report to Congress about its undercover operation. GAO found plenty of vendors, mainly in China, willing to sell crummy military-grade weapons parts -- and wound up buying more than a dozen of them. It then had an outside firm, SMT Corp., analyze them for authenticity, and SMT in extensive lab analysis found them all either blatantly fraudulent or "highly suspicious."

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The undercover work exposing the fake electronics that the military might end up ordering through Internet-based trading platforms was just a sampling, the GAO emphasizes, but shows that the threat of supply-chain fraud to the DOD is a serious national issue.

To carry out its undercover identity, GAO first "created a fictitious company and gained membership to two Internet platforms providing access to vendors selling military-grade electronic parts," the GAO report says.

GAO doesn't disclose what online trading platforms these were, but notes one of them granted membership without receiving requested documentation and the second let in the GAO's fake company after it supplied "factitious business references" that no one checked.