Anti Counterfeiting: Protection from Fraudsters and Grey Marketers

Globalization has paved way for the wide expanse of the business into areas beyond geographical

boundaries and technological innovations have helped business houses and corporate sectors make

their presence felt on the World Wide Web. These enterprises and large business houses are also faced

with challenges of theft, piracy and grey market activity.

The grey market activity being a major threat with abilities to shake up an organizations bottom line,

the product managers and executives need to work out anti-counterfeiting measures to combat this

and many more threats arising from counterfeiting issues. These threats not just affect the revenue

generation system but also corrode the company’s market share and brand reputation. The worst

effected ones by these are the pharmaceutical industries and the technology giants. The World Health

Organization reports a minimum of 10% of drugs supply being counterfeit, with the higher level going

beyond 50% and involves branded, generic and over-the counter medicines.

As for the IT industry, the proliferation of counterfeits is mostly through unauthorized channels opened

as a result of outsourcing and globalization. Reports that have poured in show the semi-conductor

industries losses amounting to billion dollars every year as a result of illegal sales. But these are just

related to reported facts. Most cases go unreported too. Even as the FBI termed product counterfeiting

as the crime of the century, the fraudsters through grey market sales and counterfeit products earn

revenue returns amounting to 600 billion dollars.

The first step towards brand protection actions is to understand the level of damage done by the grey

markets to the manufacturer as well as to the retailer. The grey market products are acquired from

the unauthorized dealers of authorized channels and are sold at higher discounts, thus affecting the

authorized sales revenue. To combat these, organizations can invest in good online fraud protection

solutions. These enterprise anti counterfeiting solutions, a software-as-a service offered by the leaders

in industry besides providing an end-to-end brand protection will also provide a round the clock real-

time monitoring of the sources which will help to list out violators and take necessary action against

them.

Another industry where the anti-counterfeiting solutions need to be implemented is the pharmaceutical

industry. Pharmaceutical counterfeiting affects not just the manufacturers but also the consumers and

the government. With the help of pharmaceutical anti-counterfeiting, manufacturers can get a clear

view of the worldwide market in a real-time format. This helps the government to find violators, stop

counterfeiting actions and recover lost revenues.