Jewelry Counterfeits: The Age-Old Problem Just Keeps Growing.
There was a time when counterfeiting was a problem only for the wealthy, the well-to-do, the well-connected. The problem took its name from the art of forgery — the cutting and pasting of a document into a blank one, then pasting it into a more authentic document.
But in the 21st century, forgers have become a problem for everyone but the truly clueless.
“In the last decade alone and continuing into the next, the number of fraud cases and the value of the lost or missing millions of dollars is likely to exceed $1 billion,” according to the FBI’s 2010 National Integrated Security Enforcement Network (NISE) annual report. “This figure represents a seven-fold increase from the last year in 2010.”
Just in the past five years, the FBI has recorded the creation of more than 450 counterfeit goods (many of them on the World Wide Web) and seized more than $2 billion in counterfeit money, according to the FBI’s 2010 NISE report.
The counterfeit goods are, of course, sold on the black market. The criminals get the goods from a variety of sources, from the illegal drug trade to online counterfeiting to black market gun parts.
The FBI estimates that in 2009, 2.8 million people worldwide suffered a loss of $1 billion worth of goods from counterfeiters, compared with $1.4 billion in 2008. The figures are even more alarming if one looks at counterfeiters in China — who are involved in creating counterfeits of all kinds, including high-end products — who lost $6.6 billion to their counterparts there, according to the report.
The problem is growing to such a degree that, if nothing is done to stop the crime, it is likely to outpace that of piracy, which is a much larger problem, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. That is not to say there is no piracy happening. There is piracy of some kind, even if it isn’t in a way that could be easily traced back to the people involved in the counterfeiting.
But counterfeiting of high-end
