Thursday, July 26 2012

LOCAL businesses suffer countless losses when they buy products they believe to be original, and in turn they get fake merchandise delivered to them.

In the printing supplies industry, counterfeiting has a global impact of $3 billion a year . At the same time, 2.5 million jobs and more than $1.5 million in tax revenues are lost as a result of counterfeiting activities in the economies of the G20 alone.

“We are all targets for piracy: stores, private businesses, and consumers in general. Anyone may think that he is buying an original product when he really isn’t,” stated Ricardo Roca, HP PPS Marketing Manager for the Central American region, Caribbean, Ecuador, and Venezuela. “Given this situation, HP wants to help our customers distinguish between an original product and a counterfeit to avoid being victimised. And that’s why we have decided to use all of the technology tools available to us to combat piracy.”

To address the situation, the company has launched a series of tools, such as HP Mobile Authentication (a mobile tool to verify the authenticity of original HP cartridges), to protect all of its users anywhere in the world, including Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Even though prevention is the best way to avoid being a victim of fraud, with HP Mobile Authentication we help our users avoid being robbed. It is not fair for people to pay for a high-quality product and instead receive a counterfeit product,” Roca explained. “No more robberies, no more making fools of consumers or businessmen who are trying to make a success of their business by honest means.”

As Roca says, HP Mobile Authentication is just one more of the security measures included in the security labels, an evolution of past labels that also had holographic characteristics.