If, like me, you’ve spent a lifetime in banking fraud, the word counterfeit almost automatically implies counterfeiting of plastics (bank cards) and checks. However, since the advent of what is commonly called chip and pin technology and the famous liability shift to merchants, with the right decline rules that sort of plastic counterfeiting should be dead. If not, at least gravitating to zero in most countries.
Today instead, I want to talk about a different and more glamorous variety of counterfeiting, that I had a brush with in a recent assignment. The client was in the luxury-fashion business. What unraveled from our link analysis assignment was a high value target in Asia that was blatantly peddling fakes at prices – I wanna say – that didn’t particularly break the bank. The client sounded suitably impressed with the find.
Clearly, there is a huge and thriving market for such knock-offs. Of course, to the trained Gucci wearing eye there are obvious red flags or markers. The emboss just looks too deep or the stitching thread is way too thick. But for most of the deliberately blissful basement shoppers, these can be easily glossed over. For someone like me (and some others in my broke-founder girl gang) we can ill-afford to impulse shop that drool worthy six-figure Hermes scarf or Louis Vuitton bag from the airport store (when you convert the foreign exchange.) So, we stew in our own ‘have-not’ness, doomscrolling Poshmark for the next best thing to NWT (new with tags) i.e. pre-loved fashion. You can justify it as a grandstanding for sustainable fashion. Although, in reality, I do think it is way more pocket friendly and pardonable than condoning fraud. (Call it the upright fraud fighter ideology, if you will 😊)
Some time back we heard about the big bang merger of the luxury behemoths behind Coach and Michael Kors in an $8.5 Billion deal. I wonder how much of the moolah is going to be spent on counterfeit prevention. The biggest asset the combined entity owns is their brand portfolio. And the erosion of the brand is what is at stake here. And unlike counterfeiting of plastics, this fraud is far from dead and only getting bigger.
There are many tricks to dealing with this sort of fraud. Pro tip #1 – Hop on a plane from your fashion capitals and take a walk down Heera Panna (Mumbai’s dupe fashion mall) and let’s start with reading the room.