Alcohol, medicine, money, car airbags – you name it, it's been faked. Now tags you can't copy
could block bogus goods forever
whisky bottlesMihai Andritoiu/Getty
By Ida Emilie Steinmark
DETECTIVES from the City of London Police had been investigating the activities of Robert Czernik for a year. In February, they finally picked him up and charged him with “selling goods liable to be mistaken for a registered trademark”. That might not sound like a heinous offence, but the goods in question were counterfeit car airbags that would not have worked properly in a collision. Police have alerted 680 people they think bought the airbags on eBay, and Czernik is due to be tried in the coming weeks.
It’s a reminder that all manner of goods are subject to fakery. People have tried to counter the problem for hundreds of years using devices intended to prove authenticity. In the Middle Ages, elaborate wax seals were the method of choice in Europe. Today, holograms and watermarks are ubiquitous. But the principle has remained the same all along: tag goods with an object that is extremely difficult to copy. Trouble is, “extremely difficult” isn’t always good enough – we need tags that are impossible to copy.
That is not beyond our wits. The basic recipe for unfakable tags has been around for 15 years, but it was always too complicated, costly and impractical. But make it work – as one man now claims he has – and fakery could be a thing of the past.
Criminals do a roaring trade in forging consumer products from cigarettes and alcohol to condoms. They aren’t shy of opportunism: knock-off solar observing glasses led to permanent eye damage for one man watching August’s US eclipse.
Perhaps the most troubling area of counterfeiting is pharmaceuticals. In
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23531452-300-fighting-fakery-how-to-make-products-immune-to-counterfeiting/
