S/Mark® Secure Information-Based Indicia
Applications include product authenticity marking, tax "stamps", and stored value tokens issued in a non-networked environment.Manufacturers lose $200 billion a year, about five percent of world trade, to product fraud such as counterfeiting and under-the-counter diversion to gray markets, according to the Washington D.C.-based International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition. With the recent rises in state cigarette taxes, losses from counterfeit cigarette tax stamps have risen dramatically. It is estimated that last year alone losses in California tax collections may be as high as $400 million. What cigarettes have in common with branded products is that each particular brand fills its distribution channel with a high volume of identical units, making it nearly impossible to identify counterfeits without expert analysis of each suspected item. And typical mass-produced security labels like holograms which themselves are counterfeited only add to the problem.
Assure Systems cost-effectively solves this problem by providing a unique, identifying mark to each item which in turn can be inspected in the field for authenticity without the need to connect to a master, central database.
Assure Systems uses sophisticated encryption technology, from world-leader RSA Security, Inc., to accomplish this, adding a powerful tool to the arsenal against product fraud.
It Works Like This. Assure Systems creates unique messages, one for every item, each containing useful information. BP8FWUCMTAX87CENTS, as an example. Assure Systems locks the message in a digital envelope producing a result such as 1L2PJCJ083TVSBQY5P9004EM. Every digital envelope, is a one-of-a-kind, unguessable product identifier called an S/Mark®. Only Assure Systems can create valid digital envelopes for your products. They cannot be created, counterfeited or altered.
Assure securely delivers the S/Mark® digital envelopes to a selected print site. If the print site is not secure, Assure provides a secure print computer to dispense the marks. A different S/Mark® is printed on each product, package or label, using readily available high-speed, variable data print technology. Most commonly, a 2D barcode format is used (example below).
TWO DIMENSIONAL BAR CODE
EASY READ AUTHENTICATION, |
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Using Assure Systems software the barcode reader will open the S/Mark® displaying the original message BP8FWUCMTAX87CENTS. The presence of TAX87CENTS proves conclusively that the mark is genuine.
Counterfeiters Are Stopped. Even copying authentic marks for reuse on counterfeit products without detection is virtually impossible. Marks read by the portable data terminal during random authentication are checked for duplicates. Then they are uploaded to Assure systems daily for further duplicate checking. A duplicate mark from anywhere in the world sounds the alarm that one is a copy and therefore counterfeit.