Black Friday needn’t be ‘Fraud Friday’ by adopting AI to stop crime networks

• More than £9 billion is expected to be spent in the UK alone over the Black Friday weekend. 
• During this period, approximately 10% is estimated to be lost to fraudsters.
• Meanwhile, banks also report a 22% spike in scams, fraud and related activity.
• Counterfeiting is now the second-biggest source of criminal income worldwide after drugs and people-trafficking, according to the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. Some estimate it could represent up to 25% of all total ‘luxury goods’ sales.
• Now accounts for 70% of the US$2 trillion global counterfeit market, which also includes pharmaceuticals and entertainment products.
• In the EU, approximately 86 million fake items valued at more than €2 billion (US$2.18 billion), representing nearly 6% of trade, were seized during 2022 alone. 

As the seasonal Black Friday shopping bonanza approaches, counterfeiters and organised criminal gangs are once again set to exploit the year’s peak sale period putting billions of pounds’ worth of consumer cash at-risk.

Criminals continually take advantage of relentless global demand for bargains, discounts and low-priced products misleading consumers into purchasing fake, lookalike replica and copycat goods. Highest-risk items include video games, toys, cigarettes, luxury fashion labels, branded jewellery, fragrances and fake CD and DVDs.

Unravelling crime networks

Sophisticated crime gangs are often hiding behind a mass of obscure networks of legal entities and loopholes. In some instances, fake goods are made outside of Europe, before having logos, tags, badges and packaging added in the EU and UK., before being sold on to unsuspecting consumers.

At the same time, social media platforms are a widespread and readily accessible criminal springboard to selling fakes and intellectual property IP-infringing products – from luxury goods and consumer electronics to illegal streaming services.

Masterminds behind the counterfeit goods trade are typically based outside the EU and UK. Instead, they often rely on a network of intermediaries to help ensure the smooth running of their criminal enterprises, while also providing a firewall and obscured shield to the upstream sections of fraudulent supply chains. 

Putting brands on the trail of the fraudsters

Gowling WLG has invested significantly in developing tech powered brand protection service Saturn, to help continually safeguard its clients’ products simultaneously across multiple global online sites.

Thanks to a combination of clever tech, brand expertise and amassed regional legal know-how, Saturn delivers fast, smart enforcement underpinned with intelligent software. The result is a holistic service that successfully manages and safeguards client brands online, while helping improve consumer protection.

Saturn’s smart searching and reporting functions drive a fast route to action and resolution, precisely tailored to meet clients’ requirements, Saturn performs global searches, provides reports, real-time gap analysis and issue take downs from a single point, at speed, at scale and at the click of a button – rather than in a piecemeal one-by-one fashion. 

Counterfeiting costs with thieves favouring thousands of well-known brands

The identification of copycat and counterfeit products, infringing websites and fake accounts on many of the world’s largest online marketplaces, social media platforms and search engines, have the potential to pose a massive headache for global brands. But thanks to Saturn, client users request the filing of takedown notices at the click of a button as soon as breaches are spotted. With every single use, Saturn’s sophisticated technology and inbuilt machine learning capabilities improve identification of suspicious infringements, consistently delivering improved and timely search results. 

The service stands apart from other solutions because it is tailored, co-ordinated and managed by a team of qualified IP lawyers who have decades of experience of brand enforcement for household names. As a result, the technology can simply and easily deliver more cost-effective and personalised strategies to better suit the nuances of any specific brand. Find out more about Saturn.