Counterfeiting: suddenly serious

You know that they are fake and that the quality is at best risky but they cost close to zero (if you haggle properly) and it's fun to kid your friends who, in the case of the bag, tie, belt or watch may never have seen the real thing and so don't realise it's not Pepsi(1). And, more, it's even fun when they do know!

And no one cares about your few bits and bobs, after all, you would never buy the real thing would you? So the company isn't really losing anything?

French customs don't agree and at Orly Airport they have, for some time, been warning people that it it is illegal to import counterfeit goods including fake luxury items. And now they are taking a tough line: in December 2002, they arrested en route from Bangkok to Madrid a passenger alledgedy carrying 144 fake Nike football strips. And 34 counterfeit telephones with the Panasonic logo. This was just a way of financing his family holidays in Thailand, customs allege.

Then in the middle of January 2003, the same team arrested a couple in their mid-twenties. Customs allege that they had 84 items with counterfeit marks of Cartier, Chanel, Gucci, Dior,Vuitton and Prada.

Only a few days later, customs stopped four women apparently from Turkey: this time there were, Customs claim, 98 items bearing the labels of Hugo Boss, Bossini, Givenchi and others.

Customs officers are made suspicious by the fact that people coming, apparently from holiday, are carrying huge amounts of baggage.

The irony of the product is that it is often the mark that is faked and the underlying product is the sort of thing one might buy for the same price without the false mark. For example, to demonstrate the point at a conference, we bought a plastic holdall (sold as leather!) bearing the Mont Blanc button-badge and with the logo embossed. The price of the bag (after serious haggling) was much the same item - without the logos - in a shop. So the casual customer would have paid more than the product was worth. It's not only the brand owners who lose.

(1) In the 1970s, the Pepsi jingle was "it's the real thing"