Like most 20-somethings, my daughter knows practically everything. She especially knows how to shop and how to find bargains, and often fastens onto me a pitying gaze when she spies me buying retail, at an actual store. That is so 20th century!
The only glitch in her savvy consumerism is that she has ended up with a closet full of fakes. Fake handbags, fake dresses, all bought on the Internet at “amazing” prices. How do we know? Sometimes the label is too dark or the buttons carry a different logo. Sometimes it’s the improbable color. Every time she tells me, breathless with excitement, about the “D&G this” or “YSL that” that she claims to have scored for next to nothing, I groan. Is this the same clever girl who scored in the top 1 percent on her college entrance exams?
Hope springs eternal, and so it is with the hundreds of thousands of people who buy branded goods online or from sidewalk vendors at extreme bargain prices. They can’t believe their good fortune, nor should they. Every day people worldwide are being duped by counterfeiters – participants in a giant $700 billion industry that is expanding so fast it could be traded as a growth stock. Although designer apparel and accessories are a large part of the trade, counterfeiters have climbed up the value chain.
Robert Taylor, manager of Eastman Kodak’s Security Solutions operation, says that the crooks have broadened into much more dangerous territory, selling ersatz food and beverage products as well as fake industrial goods such as airplane and automotive parts. Kodak works with suppliers in these fields as well as pharmaceutical companies and makers of collectibles – such as expensive trading cards or high-priced wines – all of whom find their products either being copied or stolen and sold on the black market.
Not only do companies face lost revenues – commonly as much as 4 to 5 percent of the total – but Taylor points out they also confront huge liability problems. If a person is sickened by taking a fake drug, it can be virtually impossible to prove the seller’s innocence. “It can take a knowledgeable engineer or a forensic specialist to determine whether the product was a fake,” says Taylor.
While finding that you’ve been defrauded with a non-Gucci handbag is disappointing, using faulty mechanical parts or taking tablets for heart disease that actually turn out to be talcum powder could be deadly. Let’s not even consider the damage fake condoms could cause. The World Health Organization estimates that as much as 10 percent of drugs sold are fake; another group puts sales of knock-off drugs at $75 billion worldwide. Similarly, industry sources say that there have been dozens of airline accidents caused by fake and unreliable parts. Analysts estimate that as much as 10 percent of all goods produced worldwide are fakes.
Inspector Brian O’Neill runs the Organized Crime Investigations Unit for the New York Police Department, including the Trademark Infringement Unit. His outfit has made headlines in recent years by aggressively cracking down on counterfeiters. O’Neill explains that makers of fake goods have evolved from a “local to an international business. At first, it involved silk screeners reproducing a logo on a t-shirt and sewing fake labels on jeans. That business fell off because they weren’t fooling many people. Now most items are imported, and they are very close to the originals. It’s a huge problem for the brands, and for us.”
Indeed, the evolving sophistication of counterfeiters makes detection increasingly difficult, and more expensive for industry to combat. With today’s computer capabilities it is easy to scan a label and send it to an unscrupulous commercial printer, who can reproduce it in a matter of hours, cranking out millions of labels.

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