Established in 1952, the WCO (World Customs Organisation) is the global centre of customs experience, representing 185 customs administrations that collectively process approximately 98% of world trade.

In April, Amazon released its third annual brand protection report, with an update of activities to ensure authenticity of goods sold in its store, and to fight bad actors.

Most books that I have written about in Authentication & Brand News™ (ABN) are of interest because they examine the problem of counterfeit products or consider how brand owners can fight against these counterfeits.

There are very few books to guide brand owners on their brand protection (BP) programmes, so ‘Brand Protection and the Global Risk of Product Counterfeits’ is a useful addition to that small library.

The OECD has published a series of reports into illicit trade, the most recent of which is ‘eCommerce Challenges in Illicit Trade in Fakes’. The report is the first outcome of a special project on illicit trade between the Anti-Illicit Trade Expert Group (AITEG) and the public-private partnership (PPP), established under the OECD Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade (TF-CIT).

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.

Intellectual property infringing products with a value of almost €2 billion were seized in the EU’s internal market and at external borders in 2020, according to an annual seizures report published at the end of last year.

This month’s editorial makes a longitudinal study of the shifting geo-political forces that have formed the nature of brand protection. Another, more direct, hypothesis is that counterfeiting and other types of brand fraud are straightforward criminal activities with no respect for borders, treaties or the law.

Many technologies and features with their roots in commercial printing have made, and continue to make, a substantial contribution to secure document production. However, these technologies have for the most part been concerned with producing visual colours, perceived by the unaided eye as conventional colour printing.