Brand protection during the pandemic
Counterfeiting continues to spread globally like a plague. In recent years, with the expansion of the Internet, brand-protection teams have had to battle with counterfeiters online, usually with limited resources to tackle these illicit traders. Fake goods are sold online directly to consumers, one item at a time, often by formidable and well-hidden criminal networks.
In 2017, Global Financial Integrity found that transnational crime turned over between $1.6 trillion and $2.2 trillion annually, with counterfeiting valued as the most lucrative crime ($923 billion to $1.13 trillion) followed by drug trafficking ($426 billion to $652 billion). Despite this, counterfeiting is a low priority for enforcement officials, making it a low-risk, high-reward crime. Although fake goods are often of poor quality and potentially dangerous, consumer demand for these goods is high. Under these circumstances – high demand and weak enforcement – anti-counterfeiting appears to be an insurmountable challenge for brand-protection teams. Compounding matters further, in 2020 the covid-19 pandemic spread to every corner of the globe, upending life as we know it and amplifying the counterfeiting problem.