The fight against fake

Laundry soap did seem an unusual product for someone to counterfeit. Rolex watches, Gucci handbags, Tiffany jewelry or Windows operating systems are the kinds of goods that you imagine in the counterfeit world. But fake Tide detergent? In September, 5,000 boxes of the phony stuff were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Seattle after being unloaded from a ship that had arrived from China. That shipment, the agency estimates, would have generated a profit of at least $4,000 on the Tide-labeled detergent and an additional 3,600 bags of Ariel-labeled detergent also found in the container. A favorite abroad, Ariel is sold here in such places as Mexican groceries. If there is a profit to be made, however small, somebody will try to sneak it in. And it all adds up. Two weeks later, 52,160 packages of fake Ariel were confiscated from the same importer, for which the profit would have been more than $24,000. “A detergent does seem a little weird,” Judy Staudt, a Customs import specialist, said of counterfeiting Tide or Ariel. “But you understand that it's 300 or 400 percent profit.” Nationwide, 95 percent of our overseas cargo moves through Seattle's ports, Customs officials say. A million of those 40-foot metal containers, the agency says, arrived by ocean in Seattle and Tacoma in fiscal 2009. And they have to be checked out. Counterfeiting costs U.S. businesses $200 billion to $250 billion annually, according to the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, composed of affected companies. These days, the same techniques implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to look for terrorist weapons also nab that counterfeit detergent. Customs and Border Protection now is the largest law enforcement agency in the country, with some 58,000 employees. The old Immigration and Naturalization Service, Border Patrol, U.S. Customs and federal agriculture inspectors were combined in 2003. Its search for illicit goods includes: » Sending the containers through a radiation portal monitor that looks a bit like a toll booth. The monitors record and rank any radiation emanating from the container. Ceramics, for example, emit naturally occurring, harmless radiation. But a neutron alert might come from something like oil-drilling equipment. Or it could come from plutonium to make a nuclear weapon.