Alcohol has emerged as the sector with the largest number of counterfeit cases in India in 2020, with experts attributing this to a lack of enforcement as well as high profits available for counterfeiters during the COVID-19 crisis.
Apart from alcohol, multiple other everyday food items in India including cumin seeds, mustard oil and ghee were mentioned as major sectors affected by counterfeiting activity.
Read full article.
With news of scams relating to the COVID-19 pandemic emerging on an almost daily basis, it is imperative that companies maintain and even step up efforts to secure their brands.
That’s the message from the UK’s cross-industry Anti-Counterfeiting Group (ACG) in its latest annual report, which says that while business may be struggling to contend with the coronavirus emergency “they more than ever need their brand protection workforces to help protect consumers and their company’s vital asset.”
“Criminal counterfeiters are in manufacturing overdrive,” says ACG director general Phil Lewis, adding they are working overtime to manufacture and stockpile counterfeits, ready to sell them once the heath crisis abates.
Read full article.
According to the first EU-wide intellectual property crime threat assessment from Europol and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), most criminal activity involving counterfeiting is carried out by increasingly professionalised organised crime networks, which can reap large profits while running relatively few risks.
Food and drinks remain highly popular items for counterfeiters, with the EU consistently emerging as a major destination market for counterfeit food and drinks. Detected counterfeit food products include baby milk powder, stock cubes, cheese, coffee, olive oil and pasta. Several of these goods have been found in groceries and supermarkets, illustrating that they also infiltrate the legal supply chain. As the counterfeit goods are almost always of substandard quality and produced in unhygienic environments, they can pose a serious risk to the health and wellbeing of consumers. In some cases, counterfeit food has even been found to contain dangerous or hazardous ingredients. Law enforcement authorities regularly detect other types of counterfeit goods alongside counterfeit food and drinks, highlighting how organised crime groups are frequently involved in trading an ever wider range of different counterfeit goods. In general, there appears to be an overall professionalisation of the organised crime groups involved in food counterfeiting.
Besides food, counterfeit alcoholic beverages pose a considerable risk to EU consumers. Spirits and wine are especially popular goods targeted for counterfeiting by organised crime groups. They frequently place cheap wine in bottles containing fake expensive wine labels, sometimes even adding pure alcohol on counterfeit spirits. Production methods have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, with some organised crime groups operating their own production lines, including the packaging and labelling of the product. Another method is to use legitimate production lines one day a week or month for the production of counterfeits.
Read the full report.
