A global challenge
Counterfeiting is everywhere – in retailing, software and sports kit, medicines and entertainment, clothing and luxury goods.
To protect your assets and your customers, you need to monitor the whole Internet. Not just websites, but chatrooms and auction sites, message boards and spam email traffic, too. You need to be able to scan huge volumes of information, automatically spotting the clues that matter. And you need to do it globally, round the clock, 365 days a year.
You need to spot the signs and identify priorities. In pharmaceuticals, for example, that means watching activity on B2B auctions, where legitimate sales of precursor chemicals provide raw materials for industrial scale counterfeiting.
Envisional's advanced artificial intelligence technology can do all this, and more. Our systems scan the entire Internet universe. Then they go one big step further, intelligently analysing and filtering the data to pinpoint the most sinister items.
We monitor known problem areas and detect new ones. We use intelligent text analysis and natural language processing technologies that work with any language and any character set.
When automation like this is combined with the in-depth knowledge of Envisional's expert analysts, the result is Internet intelligence you can use to take practical action, to issue cease and desist orders, take down illicit auction sites and recover misleading domain names.
No brand is an island
Gillette razor blades and Smirnoff vodka, Lipton’s teabags and Durex condoms, cancer drugs and antibiotics, Yamaha motorcycles and Mitsubishi elevators, BP garages and Montessori schools – there's nothing you can think of that’s truly immune to counterfeiting.
Wherever there’s a strong brand, there’s an opportunity for the fakers. However the accountants may value brands, these are the people who really know just what your brand equity means. And they're out to get a piece of it.
Piecing the truth together
One small online auction may seem trivial to the owner of a global brand. But something more serious is involved if the same auction is repeated a hundred times, under three different pseudonyms. Envisional's image search and pattern recognition technology automatically detects disguised commercial activity and alerts you to suspicious sites and behaviour.
Fighting the pharma fakers
Don’t get ill in Nigeria or Pakistan. If you do, there’s only a 50/50 chance the medicine you’re given will be the real thing, according to an article on counterfeiting in the British Medical journal. Things are much better in Europe and America, but a string of recent incidents has prompted the FDA to introduce new rules on drug pedigrees and US supply chain procedures in June 2006.
For more information about Envisional's anti-counterfeiting services, call Sales now on 01223 372400