FRAUD & ANTICOUNTERFEIT

Flood of counterfeited military parts from China in U.S. equipment

An investigation probe on the U.S. senate reviewed in detail approximately 1,800 cases of suspected counterfeit parts. All told, the 1,800 cases involved more than one million counterfeit parts.

The parts investigated look like new original parts but investigators found, originally came from China.

The U.S. Senate committee report said in each of the three sampled cases that the committee investigated in depth, the Department of Defense was unaware that counterfeit electronic parts had been installed on certain defense systems until the committee’s investigation.

New laws in place will mean that when a contractor finds bad parts on a weapons system, the contractor or the parts supplier will pay to fix the problem. In the past, those costs were often borne by the U.S. DOD.

According to the committee, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) says, “counterfeits cost U.S. semiconductor companies more than $7.5 billion annually in lost revenue, a figure SIA says results in the loss of nearly 11,000 American jobs.”

Multibillion Dollar fraud on the home & beauty industry

As fashion counterfeiting is increasingly driven underground, fragrance is the latest front in the fight against fakes.

Counterfeiters in general are tied to organized crime and illegal activity. There’s more money to be made in counterfeits than in drugs. And much less exposure.

Fake perfumes, however, suddenly seem to be everywhere — at flea markets, on street-side tables — but also at legitimate wholesalers that supply to retailers, and here is where the real problem starts.

Fragrance is absorbed by the body. It is a class of product that you ingest in some way through the skin.

And it’s not just fragrances that are under attack. Salon-only hair products in a drugstore or supermarket, for example, they may be counterfeit, black market, or past their expiration date.

The globalization of the economy is just one factor that fueled this problem, which is affecting the reputation of businesses and well know brands like never before.