(Nanowerk News) Last year, Operation Holiday Hoax II by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit netted 327,000 counterfeit items worth about $76.8 million. The six-week sting that ended in mid-December seized all types of counterfeit goods including handbags, technology products and wallets.
The holiday season is prime time for counterfeiters looking to lure last minute holiday shoppers with unbelievable deals, particularly on luxury goods. While advances in technology for identifying authentic products, such as 3D holograms and electronic chips, have made it easier to identify fraudulent products, counterfeiters continue to keep pace, often by reverse engineering the theft-prevention techniques so their knock-off goods appear to be real.
IBM Research scientists in Zurich, however, have devised a new way to combat counterfeiting concept, by bringing the technology to an entirely different scale -- nano.
Earlier this year IBM scientists published a paper ("Self-Assembly: Oriented Assembly of Gold Nanorods on the Single-Particle Level") with the renowned university, ETH Zurich, demonstrating how they could precisely position gold nanorods, which measure 25 by 80 nanometers, on a surface using a simple printing process. As a point of comparison, the head of a pin is about 1 million nanometers wide.
