Turkish citizen sentenced in St. Louis to 27 months in federal prison for cancer-drug fraud
ST. LOUIS — A Turkish citizen has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for smuggling counterfeit and adulterated cancer treatment drugs into the United States.
Ozkan Semizoglu of Istanbul was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in St. Louis. He pleaded guilty in July to smuggling three shipments of phony and tainted prescription drugs from Turkey to the St. Louis County suburb of Chesterfield. The drugs were labeled as “gifts” or “documents” to conceal their identity.
Lear More37 arrested this year for selling contraband cigarettes within HDB estates
There has been an increase in the number of offenders caught for storing contraband cigarettes in their flats and selling the cigarettes to other residents, according to customs authorities.
An increasing number of offenders have been caught for storing contraband cigarettes in their HDB flats and selling these duty-unpaid cigarettes to residents in the neighbourhood, customs authorities said on Tuesday (Oct 28).
In the first nine months of this year, 37 such offenders were arrested, Singapore Customs said, adding that it has since stepped up enforcement efforts to clamp down on such illegal activities.
Lear MoreBulgarian jailed for smuggling 180,000 cigarettes
October 27, 2014 | Dover-express
A VAN driver who smuggled almost 180,000 cigarettes through Dover has been jailed for two years.
Valentin Ivanov’s van was stopped by Border Force officers at Dover in September 2014. A search of the vehicle uncovered the 179,600 smuggled cigarettes hidden in the back of the van. The duty and VAT evaded on the haul was £41,747.12.
Ivanov pleaded guilty to smuggling the cigarettes into the UK and was jailed for two years at Maidstone Crown Court on October 21.
Upon sentencing, His Honour Judge Joy said that was Ivanov was a very dishonest man.
Lear MoreCigarette smugglers with gang members form Paddington, Southall and Birmingham, jailed
The gang’s smuggling plot was foiled in October 2012 when officers watched Jan Wojcik from Paddington and Pawel Pasnik from West Bromwich meet with the driver of an HGV on a secluded country lane just off the M25. A west London gang with links to Birmingham and abroad have been jailed for smuggling cigarettes after £105,240 in cash was found in wardrobes and cars. Two men, from Paddington and Birmingham, who tried to hide their criminal cash by stashing it inside their wardrobes, have been jailed for over three years each along with one other member of their cigarette smuggling gang, after an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
http://www.thecre.com/cc/?p=4353
Lear MoreThe Counterfeiting Conundrum: How Technology Will Slam the Scam
Counterfeiting is a high-margin $654 billion growth industry largely run by criminal organizations that have few disincentives to stop.
Anti-counterfeiting laws and punishment are non-existent in many jurisdictions, leaving the responsibility of abating the flow of fakes to enterprises. Legacy anti-counterfeiting technologies, such as barcodes and holograms, can be duplicated. However, a new generation of technologies are already in the field or about to be unleashed upon the counterfeiters. We detail some of the more interesting technologies in this report. (This article is brought to you by Sophic Capital.
http://www.cantechletter.com/2014/10/counterfeiting/
Lear MoreMPAA Reveals ‘World’s Most Notorious’ DVD Piracy Markets
Home entertainment may be going digital, but illegal counterfeiting of DVD movies remains rampant in parts of the world, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which outlined the findings in an Oct. 24 letter to the U.S. Trade Representative.
The USTR Sept. 26 issued a request for public comments on piracy. While the Hollywood studio trade organization detailed top online sites harboring pirated video, it acknowledged that much of the general public worldwide still comes more frequently in contact with pirated DVDs.
Lear MoreCARDINAL COMPONENTS, INC., and INFRATRAC are entering into an exclusive partnership to introduce an anti-counterfeit chemical fingerprint, LUTRACORE
Worried about counterfeiters? Cardinal Components, Inc., and its exclusive partner InfraTrac Inc., announce Lutracore® fingerprinting, a new method of safeguarding electronic components from counterfeiting using chemically coded fingerprints.
Existing approaches to detecting counterfeit electronic components rely heavily on expensive testing. But expensive tests encourage shortcuts . and shortcuts do not catch fakes. So it is imperative, to keep ahead of increasingly sophisticated counterfeiters, to employ a solution that is simple, fast, and cost-effective.
Lear MoreIcann, Regulators Clash Over Illegal Online Drug Sales
FDA, Interpol Want Internet Gatekeeper to Take Action Against Suspicious Websites, but Icann Says Its Powers Are Limited. Twenty years after the Internet went mainstream, there is no such thing as a top Internet cop. Ask the Food and Drug Administration why that matters.
In July, the FDA teamed with Interpol and dozens of countries to try to shut down more than 1,300 websites suspected of selling drugs without a prescription.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/icann-regulators-clash-over-illegal-internet-drug-sales-1414463403
Lear MoreInternational business leaders determine work programme to combat piracy and counterfeiting
ICC Secretary General John Danilovich presided over a meeting of the Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP) Steering Committee, held at the Unilever Headquarters in London on 22-23 October 2014.
BASCAP member companies, comprising intellectual property (IP) rights holders from the food, electronics, personal care, clothing, tobacco products, movie, music and software industries outlined their work plan for 2015, during the meeting.
The group committed to engage with national governments to elevate efforts to strengthen IP enforcement regimes though the production of country reports highlighting the value of IP, raising awareness of the economic and social risks stemming from counterfeiting and piracy and by promoting recommendations for improving IP enforcement.
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Cigarette Smuggling Into Vietnam on the Rise
The smuggling of illegal cigarettes from Cambodia into Vietnam is on the rise, according to recent Vietnamese media reports, which names one of the most-smuggled brands as Hero—distributed in Cambodia by prominent CPP lawmaker Ly Yong Phat.
On Monday, VietnamNet, an online news site in Vietnam—where media outlets are strictly regulated by the communist government—quoted Pham Kien Nghiep, the secretary-general of the Vietnam Tobacco Association, as saying that the number of smugglers along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border has risen drastically this year.
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/business/cigarette-smuggling-into-vietnam-on-the-rise-70853/
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