The Crime of the Century Counterfeiting – A lethal threat for your business and customers This article deals with one of the biggest, most organised and most accepted crimes – Counterfeiting, Intellectual property theft and Product piracy. Recent studies of the German custom service showed that nearly 90% of the Germans find counterfeiting socially acceptable, forming a ready market for counterfeit products. In the general opinion counterfeited watches, handbags or DVDs don’t harm people so it is maybe an inconvenience but not exactly the crime of the century. That leaves us with an important question: How big is the problem really? Every counterfeit product exposes the customer to unknown health and safety risks, endangers the jobs and ability for innovation of the people who produce the original. It contributes to the financing of organised crime and supports human trafficking, slave and child labour under unimaginable worst case conditions. The ICC (international Chamber of Commerce) estimates that 10% of all products in trade are counterfeit and will reach a trade value of 1.7 Trillion Dollars in 2015. That is the amount of money being funnelled away from further innovations and the economic stability of businesses. Alone in the OECD countries every year 1.2 Million people lose their job because of product piracy and 160,000 of them will never find a new one. An even bigger problem is the health and safety risks for costumers. A counterfeit medicine will probably not contain the vital active substance or the right doses of it. Counterfeit foods made out of industry chemicals cause serious illnesses. Counterfeit hardware such as a bolt in an aircraft may cause a fatal crash such as Partnair flight 394, still the worst crash in Norway’s aviation history. We know that in OECD-Country’s counterfeit products kill about 3,000 people every year and produce 100 Million Dollar of extra costs for the health care systems. But this is just the tip of the iceberg and the real number of incidents is much higher, which experts estimate to be between 10,000 and 100,000 times higher. So to follow this formula, the estimates should be around 30 Million people die as result of counterfeit product. That is half of the French population every year. But how can such a high number of deaths go unseen? The answer is simple. Just as counterfeits themselves, the aftereffects are well hidden. The deaths often appear years later and look natural. Counterfeit chicken eggs can cause dementia; if the fake medicine does not work the illness won, the dye for the counterfeit T-shirt may cause cancer, and in the case of Partnair flight 394 only pure luck let the investigators find one of the counterfeit bolts on the muddy sea ground. But what can we do to stop counterfeiting and piracy? The sad truth is that we can’t stop it. A counterfeiter does not care about company image, product quality, research and development, customer care, environment and work regulation so the profit is immense and there are hardly any chances to get caught. We cannot stop counterfeiting but we can and do have the social responsibility and economic interest to make to the counterfeiters’ job as difficult as possible. To achieve this we have to work closely together with the custom services and inform customers about the problem and make them aware of the dangers of counterfeits. Also counterfeit proof packaging’s are necessary to give customers and customs services the chance to determine a counterfeited product. The advantages of security printing to protect your products are various. Advanced security printing gives your customers the opportunity to spot the real deal which will increase the trust in your products and if your products are harder to fake than those of your competitors, their products will be counterfeited more often than yours. Security printing provides good evidence if an unsuspecting would-be customer is harmed by a counterfeit product and sues your company. This can protect you from high compensation payments and more important from the loss of your brand image. Counterfeiting is one of the fast growing criminal industries and is a lethal threat to all our lives. It’s time to react! For more information about counterfeiting and brand protection solutions for your business contact: Mario Gattner Graphic Design & Print-Consulting [email protected]
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 21:09:29 +0000