Book piracy and academic fraud present significant threats to education worldwide. Counterfeit textbooks flood the market, while fake diplomas erode trust in qualifications. As publishing increasingly transitions to digital platforms globally, pirates are discovering new methods to exploit vulnerabilities. In response, governments, publishers, and regulatory bodies are adopting innovative technologies. This article examines recent initiatives.

Macau is facing the common crime of counterfeit casino chips. In the latest incident, police arrested five men for defrauding a casino using 585 counterfeit chips. Each chip was marked with a denomination of HK$10,000 ($1,280), tricking the casino out of at least HK$1.8 million.

A woman from California, USA, has pleaded guilty to defrauding the United States Postal Service (USPS) out of more than $150 million in a counterfeit postage scam in Los Angeles.

The European Commission has adopted a recommendation to combat offline and online counterfeiting and enhance intellectual property rights enforcement.

An online recruitment ad in China recently garnered a lot of attention by announcing that couriers were needed to smuggle semiconductor chips, 5kg at a time, into China, with the chips having been illegally rerouted from the US.

Anti-counterfeiting efforts have become a cost of doing business; brands are outsourcing their anti-counterfeiting activities to professional advisors, law firms, investigators, and technology companies; and only 40% of brands are actually using authentication features.

In the August edition of Authentication & Brand News™ we looked at how revisions to China’s trademark laws are offering greater protection to foreign brands.

Reconnaissance has previously reported on the role of brand protection in building and policing the metaverse. Now Meta, the company that is literally betting its future on the success of the metaverse as a virtual retail store, is taking steps to protect brands’ metaverse presence.

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has announced that the social platform will launch a revamped account verification service at the beginning of December, including the allocation of different colour-coded ticks to verified individuals, government entities, and companies.

Anti-fraud product provider Outseer has released its latest findings on brand abuse, and it doesn’t make pleasant reading for online banking and eCommerce. According to the latest quarterly analysis from Outseer’s FraudAction team, brand impersonation scams continue to exploit the sharp rise in digital banking and eCommerce during the pandemic.