Editor’s Note: The complete open access article from Crime Science is attached here. Below are brief excerpts.
From: “Development of a product-counterfeiting incident cluster tool” by John Spink, Douglas C Moyer, Hyeonho Park and Justin A Heinonen.
Methods: The research builds upon earlier work that developed a typology of product counterfeiters, counterfeiting and offender groups, which is used here to create an original tool to organize and cluster the incidents. While incident data is often confidential or classified, several methods were used to access open-source information in order to apply the tool. First, a set of examples was selected from the literature to demonstrate the tool in principle. Second, in order to examine a complete data set of counterfeiting incidents, the open-source cases of the U.S. National Intellectual Property Rights Center were gathered, reviewed, coded, and analyzed to demonstrate the application of the tool.
Results: A Product-Counterfeiting Incident Cluster Tool was developed which is consistent with Routine Activity Theory and Situational Crime Prevention and is intended to identify efficient and effective countermeasures.
Product-counterfeiting incidents
***
A) Cigarette Product Fraud by Known Terrorist (Hsu [2009], Spink [2011a]): An identified ‘Hezbollah weapons-procurement officer’ was contributing to their terrorist operations by smuggling counterfeit and genuine non-taxed cigarettes into the US and affixing fake tax-stamps. This example is especially helpful for demonstrating the use of the tool since there are multiple types of actions. For clarity in the tool, this is case example ‘A’ and the diversion is noted as ‘A1’ and counterfeiting (IPR) is noted as ‘A2’. This example identifies an especially important nuance where the type of counterfeiter is a professional but the type of offender organization is a terrorist. The classification is: professional (and not ideological since the counterfeiting was to support the terrorism operations which were separate from the terrorist activities), diversion (smuggling) (‘A1’) and counterfeiting (‘A2’), and terrorist (as identified in the source documents).
