FINDING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN UNRELATED LOOKALIKE PRODUCTS
IDENTIFYING REPEAT INFRINGING PARTIES
LOCATING A KEY EXPORTING INFRINGER BY CONNECTING DATA
A well-known global health and hygiene company was notified by German customs that thousands of infringing lookalike products had been seized. The paperwork which accompanied the shipment identified a Chinese trading company (Exporter) and a Polish logistics company (Importer). After entering this information into the CHORUS system, the company discovered similarities between the exporter and two separate cases from the previous year involving similar lookalike products. In one of those cases, the importer had disclosed the identity of the Chinese seller and ultimately the manufacturer.
Once the scope of the Chinese manufacturer’s counterfeiting was identified, the company was able to coordinate with local enforcement, using the evidence found in CHORUS resulting in a robust enforcement action.
Using the powerful algorithms found in CHORUS, a shipping company was linked to five shipments of counterfeit goods seized in Slovenia over the course of six months.
This intelligence gave the client the opportunity to take further action against the intermediary to disrupt this ‘pinch point’ in the distribution chain. CHORUS further identified that two of these cases (over 10,000 items) involved the same exporter and importer, providing a further opportunity to target action against repeat infringers.
It is important to be able to keep track of counterfeiters who go to great lengths to hide their identities. CHORUS was able to identify for a client that the address of a Chinese Exporter in a German Customs seizure was indirectly associated with a known repeat infringer.
The addresses which had been entered into CHORUS the year before during a seizure in Slovakia would have been ‘forgotten’ had the results of a later investigation in China not also been entered. A few scraps of information in seemingly unrelated cases helped identify a key organizer of the export of counterfeit products from China to Europe.