One of my favorite cases, where surveillance was key to the seizure, happened to be one of the most tedious assignments as well. For years, we had been hearing stories about a cargo aircraft flying directly from China to the international airport of a Latin American capital city. As the story went, the plane would… Continue reading The Illusive China Connection

We were investigating a company in a Central American country that was counterfeiting our client’s products. We had located the counterfeiters’ warehouse and discovered they also operated a small store in the building. As a standard tactic, we decided to make a test purchase and sent two of our investigators – one to make the… Continue reading Who says that IP investigations are not dangerous?

While surveillance can be a wonderful tool for identifying counterfeiters, it is not always a walk in the park. There are times when no proper vantage point can be identified, and other times where it is simply dangerous to attempt.   In one case, we had made an online purchase of a counterfeit item for… Continue reading Surveillance can be a wonderful tool, but should not always be deployed

We had been working an investigation for several months, identifying retail locations, suppliers, distributors and warehouses of a particular group of counterfeiters. When we had documented all of the pieces of the organization, including solid evidence of their counterfeiting activities, we presented the case to the prosecutor with a request for enforcement actions.   Having… Continue reading A little insurance never hurt anyone…

We were conducting a market survey of stores selling a particular model of a camera manufactured by one of our clients that had been receiving numerous complaints about the quality of the cameras.   During the survey, we purchased counterfeit cameras from numerous small stores as well as from two different branches of a large,… Continue reading Two Investigative Approaches to solve one Counterfeit Issue

We took a case several years back for a client that had developed specialized software to protect computers in cyber cafes from unwittingly downloading malware or unauthorized programs. The company discovered that someone had counterfeited their software, removing the activation algorithm and posted the fraudulent program on the Internet for free downloading. The individual who… Continue reading Not all counterfeiters are motivated by money

Counterfeiters may not be the most innovative of people, but they sometimes have a level of ingenuity that goes beyond simply copying a product.   Take the example of a cigarette counterfeiter our company investigated several years back. A small tobacco company had successfully copied the look of the cigarettes of a popular brand, but… Continue reading Ingenuity in Counterfeiting

        Ethics is an important part of every organization. But in today’s global environment, its not enough to simply ask your employees to act ethically. Ethics are colored by a person’s culture. So before you roll out your company’s ethics program, you must first define what is meant by the word “ethics”.… Continue reading Ethics – A Question of Culture

          When referring to seized goods, most companies use U.S. dollar or other monetary amounts to quantify their results. These values are somewhat aleatory in nature because it is difficult to place a true value on seized counterfeit products. In a strict sense, the real worth of seized counterfeit products to a client is exactly zero.… Continue reading Assigning Value to Seized Products