How fake handbags fund terrorism and organized crime | Alastair Gray

169,509 views ・ 2018-01-02

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00:12
Two years ago, I set off from central London on the Tube
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and ended up somewhere in the east of the city
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walking into a self-storage unit
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to meet a guy that had 2,000 luxury polo shirts for sale.
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And as I made my way down the corridor,
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a broken, blinking light made it just like the cliche scene
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from a gangster movie.
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Our man was early, and he was waiting for me
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in front of a unit secured with four padlocks down the side.
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On our opening exchange,
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it was like a verbal sparring match
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where he threw the first punches.
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Who was I? Did I have a business card?
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And where was I going to sell?
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And then, he just started opening up,
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and it was my turn.
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Where were the polo shirts coming from?
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What paperwork did he have?
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And when was his next shipment going to arrive?
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I was treading the fine line
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between asking enough questions to get what I needed
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and not enough for him to become suspicious,
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because what he didn't know is that I'm a counterfeit investigator,
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(Laughter)
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and after 20 minutes or so of checking over the product
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for the telltale signs of counterfeit production --
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say, badly stitched labels or how the packaging
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had a huge brand logo stamped all over the front of it --
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I was finally on my way out,
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but not before he insisted on walking down to the street with me
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and back to the station.
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And the feeling after these meetings is always the same:
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my heart is beating like a drum,
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because you never know if they've actually bought your story,
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or they're going to start following you to see who you really are.
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Relief only comes when you turn the first corner
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and glance behind, and they're not standing there.
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But what our counterfeit polo shirt seller certainly didn't realize
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is that everything I'd seen and heard would result in a dawn raid on his house,
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him being woken out of bed by eight men on his doorstep
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and all his product seized.
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But this would reveal that he was just a pawn
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at the end of a counterfeiting network spanning three continents,
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and he was just the first loose thread that I'd started to pull on
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in the hope that it would all unravel.
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Why go through all that trouble?
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Well, maybe counterfeiting is a victimless crime?
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These big companies, they make enough money,
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so if anything,
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counterfeiting is just a free form of advertising, right?
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And consumers believe just that --
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that the buying and selling of fakes is not that big a deal.
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But I'm here to tell you that that is just not true.
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What the tourist on holiday doesn't see about those fake handbags
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is they may well have been stitched together
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by a child who was trafficked away from her family,
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and what the car repair shop owner doesn't realize
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about those fake brake pads
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is they may well be lining the pockets of an organized crime gang
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involved in drugs and prostitution.
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And while those two things are horrible to think about,
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it gets much worse,
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because counterfeiting is even funding terrorism.
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Let that sink in for a moment.
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Terrorists are selling fakes to fund attacks,
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attacks in our cities that try to make victims of all of us.
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You wouldn't buy a live scorpion,
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because there's a chance that it would sting you on the way home,
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but would you still buy a fake handbag
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if you knew the profits would enable someone to buy bullets
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that would kill you and other innocent people six months later?
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Maybe not.
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OK, time to come clean.
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In my youth --
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yeah, I might look like I'm still clinging on to it a bit --
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I bought fake watches while on holiday in the Canary Islands.
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But why do I tell you this?
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Well, we've all done it,
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or we know someone that's done it.
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And until this very moment, maybe you didn't think twice about it,
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and nor did I,
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until I answered a 20-word cryptic advert
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to become an intellectual property investigator.
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It said "Full training given and some international travel."
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Within a week, I was creating my first of many aliases,
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and in the 10 years since, I've investigated fake car parts,
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alloy wheels, fake pet grooming tools,
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fake bicycle parts,
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and, of course, the counterfeiter's favorite,
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fake luxury leather goods, clothing and shoes.
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And what I've learned in the 10 years of investigating fakes
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is that once you start to scratch the surface,
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you find that they are rotten to the core,
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as are the people and organizations that are making money from them,
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because they are profiting on a massive, massive scale.
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You can only make around a hundred to 200 percent
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selling drugs on the street.
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You can make 2,000 percent selling fakes online
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with little of the same risks or penalties.
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And this quick, easy money
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then goes on to fund the more serious types of crime,
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and it pays the way to making these organizations,
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these criminal organizations, look more legitimate.
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So let me bring you in on a live case.
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Earlier this year, a series of raids took place
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in one of my longest-running investigations.
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Five warehouses were raided in Turkey,
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and over two million finished counterfeit clothing products were seized,
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and it took 16 trucks to take that all away.
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But this gang had been clever.
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They had gone to the lengths of creating their own fashion brands,
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complete with registered trademarks,
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and even having photo shoots on yachts in Italy.
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And they would use these completely unheard-of and unsuspicious brand names
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as a way of shipping container loads of fakes
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to shell companies that they'd set up across Europe.
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And documents found during those raids
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found that they'd been falsifying shipping documents
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so the customs officials would literally have no idea
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who had sent the products in the first place.
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When police got access to just one bank account,
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they found nearly three million euros
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had been laundered out of Spain in less than two years,
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and just two days after those raids,
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that gang were trying to bribe a law firm to get their stock back.
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Even now, we have no idea where all that money went,
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to who it went to,
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but you can bet it's never going to benefit the likes of you or me.
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But these aren't just low-level street thugs.
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They're business professionals, and they fly first class.
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They trick legitimate businesses
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with convincing fake invoices and paperwork,
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so everything just seems real,
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and then they set up eBay and Amazon accounts
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just to compete with the people they've already sold fakes to.
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But this isn't just happening online.
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For a few years, I also used to attend automotive trade shows
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taking place in huge exhibition spaces,
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but away from the Ferraris and the Bentleys and the flashing lights,
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there'd be companies selling fakes:
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companies with a brochure on the counter
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and another one underneath, if you ask them the right questions.
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And they would sell me fake car parts, faulty fake car parts
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that have been estimated to cause over 36,000 fatalities,
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deaths on our roads each year.
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Counterfeiting is set to become a 2.3-trillion-dollar underground economy,
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and the damage that can be done with that kind of money,
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it's really frightening ...
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because fakes fund terror.
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Fake trainers on the streets of Paris,
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fake cigarettes in West Africa,
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and pirate music CDs in the USA
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have all gone on to fund trips to training camps,
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bought weapons and ammunition, or the ingredients for explosives.
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In June 2014, the French security services
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stopped monitoring the communications of Said and Cherif Kouachi,
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the two brothers who had been on a terror watch list for three years.
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But that summer, they were only picking up that Cherif was buying
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fake trainers from China,
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so it signaled a shift away from extremism
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into what was considered a low-level petty crime.
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The threat had gone away.
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Seven months later,
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the two brothers walked into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine
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and killed 12 people, wounded 11 more,
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with guns from the proceeds of those fakes.
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So whatever you think, this isn't a faraway problem happening in China.
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It's happening right here.
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And Paris is not unique.
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Ten years earlier, in 2004, 191 people lost their lives
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when a Madrid commuter train was bombed.
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The attack had been partly funded by the sale of pirate music CDs in the US.
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Two years prior to that, an Al Qaeda training manual
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recommended explicitly selling fakes
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as a good way of supporting terror cells.
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But despite this, despite the evidence connecting terrorism and counterfeiting,
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we do go on buying them, increasing the demand
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to the point where there's even a store in Turkey
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called "I Love Genuine Fakes."
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And you have tourists posing with photographs on TripAdvisor,
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giving it five-star reviews.
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But would those same tourists have gone into a store
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called "I Love Genuine Fake Viagra Pills"
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or "I Genuinely Love Funding Terrorism"?
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I doubt it.
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Many of us think that we're completely helpless
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against organized crime and terrorism,
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that we can do nothing about the next attack,
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but I believe you can.
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You can by becoming investigators, too.
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The way we cripple these networks is to cut their funding,
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and that means cutting the demand
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and changing this idea that it's a victimless crime.
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Let's all identify counterfeiters,
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and don't give them our money.
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So here's a few tips from one investigator to another
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to get you started.
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Number one:
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here's a typical online counterfeiter's website.
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Note the URL.
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If you're shopping for sunglasses or camera lenses, say,
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and you come across a website like medical-insurance-bankruptcy.com,
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start to get very suspicious.
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(Laughter)
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Counterfeiters register expired domain names
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as a way of keeping up the old website's Google page ranking.
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Number two:
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is the website screaming at you that everything is 100 percent genuine,
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but still giving you 75 percent off the latest collection?
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Look for words like "master copy,"
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"overruns," "straight from the factory."
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They could write this all in Comic Sans, it's that much of a joke.
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(Laughter)
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Number three:
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if you get as far as the checkout page,
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and you don't see "https" or a padlock symbol next to the URL,
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you should really start thinking about closing the tab,
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because these indicate active security measures
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that will keep your personal and credit card information safe.
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OK, last one:
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go hunting for the "Contact Us" page.
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If you can only find a generic webform,
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no company name, telephone number, email address, postal address --
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that's it, case closed.
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You found a counterfeiter.
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Sadly, you're going to have to go back to Google
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and start your shopping search all over again,
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but you didn't get ripped off, so that's only a good thing.
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As the world's most famous fictional detective would say,
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"Watson, the game is afoot."
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Only this time, my investigator friends,
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the game is painfully real.
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So the next time you're shopping online,
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or perhaps wherever it is,
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look closer, question a little bit deeper, and ask yourself --
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before you hand over the cash or click "Buy,"
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"Am I sure this is real?"
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Tell your friend that used to buy counterfeit watches
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that he may just have brought the next attack one day closer.
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And, if you see an Instagram advert for fakes,
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don't keep scrolling past,
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report it to the platform as a scam.
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Let's shine a light on the dark forces of counterfeiting
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that are hiding in plain sight.
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So please, spread the word
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and don't stop investigating.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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