Foreword

The first fake I ever held in my own hands was a brake pad.

It looked right. It had the right box, the right part number, the right little holographic sticker in the corner that was supposed to mean a factory in Germany had made it and stood behind it. A mechanic in Birmingham had fitted four of them to a family hatchback and thought nothing of it, because why would you. They came through a normal supplier, at a normal price, in normal packaging.

I broke one in half on a workbench a few weeks later. Where the friction material should have been there was a grey compressed filler, the texture of a digestive biscuit, bound with something cheap. Under heavy braking it would have glazed, then faded, then more or less stopped doing the one thing a brake pad exists to do. I have no idea whether the car those four went into ever had to stop hard. I think about it more than I would like.

That is the part of this business nobody puts on a slide. Counterfeiting gets sold to the public as a victimless bit of fun. A knock-off handbag on a beach. A cheeky fake watch from a man with a suitcase. Wink, wink, who's it hurting. And honestly, some of it is exactly that, and I'll be the first to tell you the superfake chapter in this book was the most fun to research. But the handbags are the shallow end. Go a few steps further out and you are standing in water over your head: medicines with no medicine in them, pills that kill the teenager who swallows one, aircraft parts pulled out of a skip in Shenzhen and re-stamped as new.

I spent about fifteen years chasing this. Customs sheds at six in the morning. Freight manifests that don't add up. Test buys paid for out of a brand's budget, delivered to a flat I rented under a name that wasn't mine, opened on camera in case the contents mattered later. Most of it is boring. That is the first thing to understand. The work that actually catches a counterfeiter is patient, unglamorous and slow, and it looks nothing like the thing the industry sells.

Here is the thing the industry sells. Takedowns. A counterfeiter lists a fake, your provider files a notice, the listing comes down, everyone counts it as a win. Big number on the quarterly report. Listings removed: forty thousand. Look how hard we worked.

The listing was back by lunchtime.

That is not a figure of speech. The seller who had that listing taken down has two hundred more sitting ready, behind two hundred shell accounts, on a dozen platforms, and relisting is a button. You are not fighting a listing. You never were. You are fighting a person, and the person hasn't been touched. They haven't lost a pound. They don't even know your name. You have spent your money playing a fairground game where the moles come up faster than you can swing, and the man who owns the machine is selling tokens.

I wrote this book because almost everyone in this fight is losing it on purpose, and they don't know that's the choice they've made.

The people who actually win, the small number of them, do something different and harder. They don't delete the fake. They find the human behind it. They follow the money to a real account with a real name. They freeze it. They take it. They make the counterfeiter, for once, the one who's out of pocket and frightened. It is slower, it is less satisfying on a dashboard, and it is the only thing that has ever changed how a counterfeiter behaves.

What follows is a set of true stories about how that gets done, and a few about how spectacularly it fails. Fake shops in China so convincing the staff didn't know they were fake. A cancer drug that turned out to be saline and dye, traced backwards through six countries to the people who shipped it. A courtroom in Chicago that can freeze a thousand sellers in a single morning before a single one of them knows they've been sued. They are real. I have sourced every one of them, and where I'm not certain I say so.

You can read this for the stories. Plenty of people will, and that's fine by me. But if you own a brand that someone, somewhere, is currently busy copying, read it for the other thing. The fake is easy to find. It was always easy to find. The person behind it is the whole game.

Stop counting takedowns. Start catching people.