Counterfeiting of automotive components represents a historic problem for the automotive industry and for road safety, which, with the spread of e-commerce, is reaching unprecedented levels.
More than 1,000 companies dedicated to the automotive industry employ almost 340,000 people in Spain, being one of the most critically important economic sectors for the national economy which is currently facing one of the greatest economic and social plagues: spare parts and spare parts counterfeit.
In this sense, 20% of Spaniards admit to having purchased counterfeit products in the last year, a very high and surprising figure.Even more so when we see the most counterfeited products,including braking or protection systems such as airbags. With this situation, the role of anti-fraud companies such as SICPA becomes increasingly necessary to put the mafias in difficulty.
According to the multinational SICPA Spain in its report “Situation of illicit trade and fraud in Spain, Europe and the rest of the world”, 13% of Europeans admitted to having intentionally purchased counterfeit products in the last year, a percentage that is growing in Spain even 20% of the total, behind only Bulgaria with 24%.
As counterfeits are increasingly difficult to detect, they focus on structural spare parts, after-sales service spare parts, diesel filters, air filters and even braking and safety systems such as airbags, with serious risk also for the lives of the vehicle occupants.
A huge market of potential customers is the perfect breeding ground for this fraud to become a succulent business avenue for organized crime and an easy resource to finance other more serious criminal activities such as terrorism or drug trafficking.
Braking or protection systems such as airbags are faked
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SICPA has been implementing anti-fraud security solutions for years that secure millions of products and their packaging every year, protecting both brands and consumers, and has specific experiance in the auto parts sector.
Furthermore, the Swiss “anti-fraud” multinational, present in Spain through its headquarters in Madrid, has tools to combat the three problems of this sector: counterfeiting (the copy of a product or its packaging that simulates the original), alteration (variation of a product) and cracks in the supply chain (problem of black markets and parallel markets).