It’s one thing to combat theft from shops – but what of the loss to your sales from counterfeit goods, under-cutting you on price?
A BBC TV documentary looked into fake football shirts.
For a half-hour documentary, The Fake Football Shirt sting could only cover so much ground about counterfeiting. But it did enough to show something of how widespread the problem is – a problem if you are a brand like Umbro, that is. To the Far East manufacturers of fake, look-alike England football shorts, through to the market stall sellers of the shirts, and the football fans wearing them, there did not seem a problem. A revealing exchange came early on in The Money Programme in March. The programme-makers were in a pub and surveyed drinkers; could they tell apart a fake England soccer shirt from an authentic one; and did they care if they were wearing a fake shirt? The admittedly unscientific survey (including a ‘fake’ Michael Owen, a look-alike of the England striker, modelling a genuine shirt) found that the average person could not tell the fake from the authentic. Nor did football fans mind they wore a fake, that cost them less. This called to mind the Channel 4 documentary Secrets of the Shoplifters, featured in last year’s retail security supplement. Then, Prof Martin Gill had made the point that the public is prepared to buy stolen goods; and to do something about that requires education of the public. The Channel 4 programme ended with the reporter Deborah Davies (of documentary maker Chameleon TV) confronting a Scottish shop thief at her market stall (where, you may recall, she was selling clothes still with the shop label on); the thief hid. There was shades of that in The Money Programme, which put it to a market trader that his England football clothing was not genuine but fake. The best that the tongue-tied trader could come up with was that he didn’t know.
The documentary did lay on with a trowel the fact that ‘George’, the investigator working for Umbro, was a ‘secret agent’ (at that point a James Bond theme came on). George had his voice and face disguised, and his car number plate fuzzed out on screen (though we did see that he smokes Benson & Hedges). Once the BBC got over the point that the case was secret (and therefore exciting and watchable) it did have plenty to say. First, we saw ‘an industrial estate in the north of England’ one winter evening. George was trapping a man selling England counterfeit shirts, by posing as a market trader looking for shirts. This first ‘sting’ had taken months of building trust with the seller. The stakes are high for the replica football kit market: the England shirt is the number one, all-time best seller, and sales will mean big profits for the likes of Umbro during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. But big profits, too, for the counterfeiters, who may offer shirts at a quarter of the official price. It’s vital for Umbro to crack down on the counterfeits, bearing in mind that Umbro have paid £180m to the Football Association for the right to sell the genuine shirts.
George has a background in trading standards, specialising in undercover work. He claims to have seized more than £11m in counterfeit goods. He defined success as removing goods from the market-place, and keeping on doing it, giving the counterfeiter ‘grief’. The documentary next showed Giles Speid, Brent and Harrow trading standards officer in north London. We saw the police and trading standards staff wearing anti-stab vests before they set off on a raid on Wembley Market. What the programme did not have time to say was that the raid (Operation Dawn) took six months to arrange because there were so many agencies involved. The authorities picked up more than 30 traders selling counterfeit goods. But the programme certainly gave the impression that it would be more difficult to find traders selling genuine goods. The operation led to three vans full of seized goods. George was there on the day, too.
On camera Giles Speid made the point that the mark-up for counterfeit goods is as good as for drug-trafficking. But criminals see that prosecutions about counterfeit goods lead to lower prison terms than drug-dealing; so criminals go into counterfeiting, where the penalties are less, if caught. And as George said: “Counterfeiting is seen [by criminals] as a way of laundering money.”
Next stop on the documentary; Northern Ireland. An unidentified Police Service of Northern Ireland officer was working with George. PSNI detectives went into a shop, using a warrant, and representatives of Rangers Football Club (with a large fan base in Northern Ireland) and Umbro went in after them. Among the unauthorised clothes on sale was a shirt with Newcastle United on one side, and an Ulster loyalist badge on the other. Also for sale was a balaclava with a sectarian badge, hinting at links between counterfeiters and para-militaries. At the van filled with confiscated goods, George and a detective went through the catch, reckoning that it originated from Thailand. According to George, Thailand is the number one country for counterfeit football shirts (and not forgetting other clothing, and perfume and so on). The programme could not offer any certain statistics about how widespread counterfeit football shirts are – one in 30? nine in ten?! It was agreed, though, that the internet is an ideal tool for counterfeits, for UK sellers to team with Far East suppliers.
Here we came to the meat of the documentary: George travelled to the Far East, to complete a ‘sting’. He could use the anonymity of the internet – we saw him using a hotmail e-mail account under a false name – to make contact with a Thai manufacturer. First, another early-morning raid with a warrant on a suspected counterfeiter, searching for paperwork and computer hard drives, for details of foreign manufacturers of counterfeits. Next stop: Bangkok (with the predictable TV footage of Thai kick boxers to tell us where we were going). George’s cover story was simple; he was a UK counterfeiters with the new England away strip, before it was launched. But it was a fake; the hope was that the Thais would be tricked into making it, and wasting time and money. A first meeting between George and a woman, at a cafe, was filmed from a distance. The woman revealed that she has a contact in Customs who helps to smooth the way with a shipment. George next visited the local police, to ask them to take counterfeiting more seriously. There are raids on shops, but Thai retailers make little effort to hide the fact that their merchandise is fake. But as George said, there is no point in taking ten shirts from a market stall-holder; you have to concentrate on the manufacturers, and wholesalers. Hence a raid on factories on the outskirts of Bangkok, which (as in England) took months to prepare. The workers, amusingly, carried on working even as the officials walked around during the raid. The warrant only applied to Umbro kit, and so we saw a Liverpool top being steam-ironed. The shirt factory’s counterfeit makes included ‘security’ features, by the thousands. Another investigator for Umbro told the camera that the owner would probably be fined, which again raised the question of whether, as in the UK, the punishment for the crime would deter the counterfeiters. Meanwhile, at a second meeting, George made a deal for 5,000 shirts. Back at his hotel, George was jubilant; the Thais did not seem to suspect anything. The sting was complete on the launch of the official away strip, modelled by England players like Michael Owen and David Beckham. George had handed to the Thais a likely-looking design but with features the true shirt did not have. As the documentary put it, ‘one small victory’ for George. George finally spoke of keeping up the momentum against the counterfeiters, but the last, pessimistic word went to Tim Phillips, author of Knockoff: The Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods: The True Story of the World’s Fastest Growing Crimewave (published by Kogan Page). He said: “The evidence of the last 20 or 30 years is that they [shirt firms like Umbro] are not going to win against the counterfeiters; the best they can do is get it [the crime] down to a minimum level.”
