Defining the types of counterfeiters, counterfeiting, and offender organizations

Abstract

Background: Product counterfeiting is growing in scope, scale, and threat. This includes awareness of deceptive and non-deceptive counterfeiting types. (This paper does not consider copyright or digital piracy, currency counterfeiting, fraudulent documents, or artwork forgery.) In response, many organizations are focusing on product counterfeiting including INTERPOL, International Standards Organization, World Health Organization, World Customs Organization, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The goal of this research is to help brand owners and agencies efficiently select appropriate countermeasures including overt, covert and forensic packaging features, as well as functions of market monitoring, modifying supply chains, enforcement, prosecution and legislation. Methods: To understand how product counterfeiting is perceived, researched, and categorized we reviewed previous work in criminology, packaging science, behavioral science, supply chain management, economics, and business management. Results: We use this collective literature to develop a typology of product counterfeiters, counterfeiting, and offender groups. Conclusions: It is important to understand that anti-counterfeit strategies must be based on understanding the nature of the fraud and the fraudster. Developing a typology is common practice in criminology and is no less important for product counterfeiting. The concepts in this paper provide a typology to help organize a complex set of information. This assists in explaining the opportunity structure of the problem based on the type of counterfeiting, counterfeiter, and offender organization.

Development of a product-counterfeiting incident cluster tool

“…Our previous research, which identified the types of criminals that were associated with product-counterfeiting incidents ranging from recreational to professional, are defined in Table 1 (Spink and Moyer 2011b;Spink et al 2013). …”

“…It is important to note that the concepts are often more generally referred to as fraud since in many situations the incidents are not a violation of intellectual property rights laws or not technically the violation of a criminal statute (Spink et al 2013). Considering fraud as the threat is a holistic and all-encompassing concept.…”

“…In order to address the growing global problem of product counterfeiting, we previously created a theoretical foundation that included the development of a typology for counterfeiters, types of counterfeiting, and offender organizations (Spink et al 2013). With a productcounterfeiting typology established, this research expands on intelligence gathering of the counterfeiting incidents with the aim of developing a product-counterfeiting incident cluster tool intended to help organize product counterfeit incidents.…”

“…There is precedence in the field of crime science for developing typologies (Spink et al 2013). A typology furthers crime prevention by defining common terms and concepts including the types of counterfeiters, counterfeiting, and offender groups that will help in the selection of countermeasures.…”

Critiquing the Inter-Disciplinary Literature on Food Fraud

“…This literature tends to deal with technical and evidential issues and seldom strays into criminological debate. The bulk of academic publications on economically motivated adulteration (EMA) are based upon the US work of Spink and colleagues (Spink 2011;Spink and Moyer 2011a and b;Spink 2012;Moore Spink and Lipp 2012;Spink, Moyer, Park, and Heinonen, 2013;Spink, Moyer, Park and Heinonen, 2014) and generally covers structural issues which lead to the practice of fraud. In particular, the issue of fraudulent mislabeling of one type of food as another is a hot topic (for example, the process of labeling horsemeat as prime beef or adulterating beef with cheaper horsemeat or horse protein to inflate the profit).…”