Earlier this month, City of London Police unveiled their I Won’t Buy Fakes campaign, as part of its Intellectual Property (IP) crime unit, aimed at tackling copyright infringement.
As the Commissioner of the City of London Police, Adrian Leppard, said, intellectual property crime is costing the UK economy hundreds of millions of pounds each year, with organised crime gangs causing significant damage to industries that produce legitimate, high quality, physical goods and online and digital content in an increasingly competitive climate
In addition, some 2.5 million jobs are lost across the developed world through the manufacture and sale of counterfeit goods, while brands in Western Europe lose more than $7.5bn in income every year due to people buying fake replicas.
Worryingly, less than a third of UK consumers say they have never bought counterfeit goods, showing the scale of the problem and, according to research the value of fake goods bought is likely to treble over the course of the next few years.
Even more worryingly, counterfeit products are not confined to shoes and handbags. In Europe 10 per cent of all medicines and supplements that are sold are fakes, while in Africa, that figure rises to a staggering 50 per cent.
The City of London Police say that the best way to stop fakes causing so much damage is to simply stop buying them, so is urging individuals and firms to click on the ‘I Promise not to buy fakes’ button on their website and to get their friends to join the campaign too.