A SIMPLE and inexpensive plastic tag containing a unique pattern of trapped bubbles could ensure you鈥檙e buying the genuine article and not some cheap imitation.
Counterfeit consumer goods are rife. Across the European Union, for example, big-name companies claim that cheap imitations are losing them sales of up to 鈧�66 billion a year.
鈥淧eople are being conned by big-time crooks,鈥� says Glyn Roberts of the Pentland Group, which owns the Speedo swimwear and Lacoste clothing brands, among others. In some cases, the counterfeiters approach the factories that previously produced goods for the legitimate owner of the brand and pay them to make the same products.
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To show its clothes are authentic, the Pentland Group sews a two-dimensional bar code into them, with the cotton stitching the 鈥渋nk鈥� of the bar code. The bar code can be copied, but for most counterfeiters the weaving technology is too expensive to set up to be worthwhile.
Now Novatec, a company based at Montauban in France, has developed an authentication tag that is impossible to copy, and can be used in watches, CDs or electronics goods as well as fabrics. The system uses plastic discs called ProofTags that can be between 1 and 10 millimetres across. As the plastic cools during manufacture, bubbles form at random. Novatec says that the chances of two tags forming the same pattern are as minuscule as 1 in 1040.
An image of the bubble pattern of each tag is recorded in a database, along with the tag鈥檚 serial number. To ensure an item is authentic, customers and law enforcement officials can simply check a particular item鈥檚 tag against the pattern of bubbles recorded in the database.
ProofTags could be used to authenticate passports, wine or even bank notes, says Franck Bourri猫res of Novatec. But he points out, 鈥淭he security of the system depends on the security of the database.鈥�