Fraudsters’ Tricks to Counterfeiting
Sydney, Australia
Year Founded:
Project Stage:
2015
Organization type:
for profit
Idea
Budget:
$1,000 - $10,000
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
In one case, the drug which was delivered to a customer in Nebraska through the internet was traced to have come from Toronto, Canada which had been moved from Dubai, smuggled from Jakarta, Indonesia and had been manufactured in China.
Impact: What is the impact of the work to date? Also describe the projected future impact for the coming years.
It is even more challenging to spot fakes from real ones. Counterfeiters seem to take extra effort into perfecting their packaging and product. Tiniest details including bar codes are even traced significantly from real ones that it can even pass code scanners.
Spread Strategies: Moving forward, what are the main strategies for scaling impact?
While the battle is getting fiercer and the complaints increasing, specific countermeasures are being taken by the pharmaceutical industry which includes overt features, such as holograms, covert features, such as digital watermarks, and initiatives that track and trace products.
Financial Sustainability Plan: What is this solution’s plan to ensure financial sustainability?
Just as suspected, counterfeit drugs are mostly available in black markets. In third world and poor countries, these black markets can be seen on the streets. In Africa and the Middle East, for instance, rows of kiosks show various medicines ranging from erectile dysfunction medicines to drugs claiming cure for cancer. However, the authorities cannot entirely take down street vendors as some of them are not entirely fraudulent.
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Michael Deats, a former head of enforcement at the MHRA, who now works for the WHO’s department of essential medicines and health products says, “Some pharmaceutical company sales representatives sell their wares in street markets to meet sales targets ‘which adds a certain legitimacy to these street-markets’”. Fraudsters take this chance to merge their own fake products with legitimate ones.
Founding Story
Drug counterfeiting is becoming a lucrative business and we can expect that the people behind this illegal practice are much more experienced in tricking the law than we can possibly imagine.
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