Yes their full company name is Cliff Electronic Components Limited, Surrey UK.
The problem is with all the names.
Cliff USA was the original USA distributor, but they are also the ones that had the knockoffs made in China.
"In 2008, the firm also discovered that a Cliff-branded product returned under complaint from an end-user was not manufactured by an authorised Cliff company or in any Cliff production facility.
It launched an investigation and found that the product in question had been cloned by Cliff Hong Kong and marketed by Cliff Electronic Components, Inc., which was at that time Cliff UK's official distributor in the USA.
This discovery led to the formation of the current authorised USA distributor Cliff Inc."
That is why it is all confusing due to the company names.
I just got a reply from Brandon at AES:
I think even he is confused but he states that they do carry the UK made Cliff jacks so I will be getting those in a few days.
This has been an issue for sometime. Please note there never were any "counterfeit" Cliff jacks.
What happened was that a company acquired the right to use the Cliff name in the US, so that there ended up being two companies legally selling jacks with the name Cliff.
For a time period we did carry the Cliff USA jacks(the ones you don't want.)
However, we no longer stock those, and everything we have now is from Cliff UK.
We even changed the part numbers to reflect this.
So if you placed an order yesterday, you would receive the Cliff UK jacks(the ones you want.)
sincerely,
Brandon AES