Cigarette 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/
Lear MoreGlad tidings for tobacco firms, smokers
Two players drive the global tobacco industry – the legal and the illegal players. While the former group comprised the registered corporate entities that have known addresses, business structures and employees, who pay the appropriate taxes and comply with laws of the different countries in which they operate, the latter group is unknown and cannot be regulated. Examples of the legal players in the country are the British American Tobacco Nigeria, International Tobacco Company, Ilorin, and Leaf Tobacco, Kaduna.
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I Spent A Day With A Guy Selling Illegal Cigarettes On The Streets Of New York
It’s a cloudy and cool September morning on Staten Island when I make my way to Bay Street looking for someone to sell me illegal cigarettes. I don’t smoke, but ever since Eric Garner’s haunting death here a few months ago after the police approached him for selling “loosies”—individual, untaxed cigarettes—I’ve wanted to know how easy it is to find someone who will sell me illegal smokes on the street.
As I walk into a bodega across from Tompkinsville Park, which sits a couple of blocks from the Staten Island Ferry terminal, a tall, dark-skinned man overhears my conversation with the owner and offers me a pack of “Newps,” or Newports, for eight dollars. He tells me his name is Debo Lato. He’s 51 and his “office” is just outside the bodega, right in front of the spot where Garner was killed on July 17.
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Countering the counterfeiters: The art of making money
Legend has it that when the surrealist painter Salvador Dali had to pay for an expensive restaurant meal he would twizzle his famous mustache and arch his eyebrows before beguiling his host into letting him dine for free.
The crafty Catalan, it is said, would write out a check for the required amount and sign on the dotted line. Just before handing the payment over, however, he would pull the piece of paper back and pen an elaborate doodle on the opposite side.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/22/business/countering-the-counterfeiters-art-money/
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