A “fingerprint” to detect counterfeit goods with your smart phone

Credit: Thomas Just Sørensen

Consumers of a wide array of goods — from luxury watches, designer handbags and athletic shoes to medications, bottles of wine and tins of biscuits — have not been able to easily check the authenticity of an item they purchased. They have to trust every step of the manufacturing and supply chain.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have developed a system to use a smart phone and phone app to check whether a product is genuine or fake. The system involves printing a QR-code on a label, or tag, and then spraying the code with a transparent ink that contains readable micro particles. After nearly 10,000 tests with no false positives, the researchers are confident they have created “the world’s safest” anti-counterfeiting system.

The tags, or chemical "fingerprints", are inexpensive to produce, and as unique as fingerprints. The tags can be as small as the size of a comma. Before leaving the factory, a product is tagged, and the tag’s fingerprint is then registered in a database. The UPC code and tag can then be checked back to the database by a smart phone and app.

The University of Copenhagen has patented the system. Currently only the final software component is incomplete. The researchers expect to have that completed this year. Their research has been published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.


New weapon to combat counterfeit goods: use your smartphone to check for fake merchandise

Published February 21, 2019, on ScienceDaily; source, the University of Copenhagen.



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