I have just finished another book about the business of counterfeiting, “Fake Goods, Real Money – the counterfeiting business and its financial management”. This is not a new book – it was published in 2018 - but it complements another book I read and reviewed recently, “Counterfeiting in China” by Dr Ko-Lin Chin (you can see that on LinkedIn here).
This book is short – just 75 pages – so you can read it in a couple of hours. It is co-authored by a group of academics, including criminologist Georgios Antonopoulos (see bio here), who has written other studies on counterfeiting. It combines empirical data with interviews of active counterfeit sellers, law enforcement, and other experts. Unlike Dr Chin’s book, which focused on China, this one covers the importation, distribution and retail end of the process in the UK or Europe, although China features as a key origin country.
The book has some similar findings to Dr Chin’s book:
Compared to Dr Chin’s book, this is a brief study focused more on financial aspects of counterfeiting, with no deep dives into the profiles of the participants. There was less here about the sense of risk that counterfeiters feel, and where they may be vulnerable to attack. Some of the UK-based counterfeiters profiled in the book are the primary distributor and promoter in-country, freely making use of social media, and responsible for significant volumes of sales. This suggests that, apart from tackling sources of supply overseas, it may be effective to target some of these local market-makers with low-cost law enforcement actions. The overall impression is that, except for a minority of career criminals specialising in counterfeiting of very lucrative products, the majority of counterfeit activity is opportunistic and casual. We should be cautious of selection bias – these findings may be down to the profiles of the interview subjects that the researchers were able to reach, who might be the most accessible and amateur operators. It may also be skewed towards counterfeiting of fashion and clothing, which is both more widespread and more likely to be carried out casually. We should not let this obscure the more organized and nefarious operators involved, for example, in counterfeit healthcare. These operations are of course much less accessible to research such as this.
The authors acknowledge that they had limited material, and called for more data sharing between private and public sector – a familiar refrain. Perhaps it is time that IP owners put their data to work and harness the interest of academics to engage in more rigorous studies of economic patterns of counterfeiting in their industry. This could help them inform their strategies and educate their internal stakeholders how to tackle counterfeiting more systematically.
