WebProNews

Tag: Counterfeiting

  • Ailina Tsarnaeva In Court for Counterfeiting Case

    Ailina Tsarnaeva In Court for Counterfeiting Case

    Ailina Tsarnaeva, sister of the Tsarnaeva brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, appeared in court yesterday to answer charges dealing with a counterfeiting ordeal in 2011. Tsarnaeva surrendered herself to the court to clear a nearly 3 year old warrant against her.

    On January 13, 2011, Tsarnaeva plead not guilty to “misleading and impeding an investigation” dealing with the passing of counterfeited money at an Applebee’s at South Bay Mall in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

    While Tsarnaeva was not intimately involved in the crime, she was the owner of the van in which the criminals left the scene. The charges of “misleading and impeding an investigation” stem from the fact that when questioned, Tsarnaeva admitted that she was present in the vehicle and with the accomplices, but would not cooperate in terms of identifying the criminals. Before being charged for any crimes, Tsarnaeva told police “she did not want to be a snitch.”

    Assistant Suffolk District Attorney William Champlin IV wanted the court to hold Tsarnaeva on a $1,500 bail due to her previous history of skipping out on a hearing related to the incident, but Tsarnaeva’s attorney, George Gormley, informed the judge that Tsarnaeva was not a flight risk: “This is a voluntary surrender appearance to get back in good standing with the court with a view toward defending this case. My client is practically indigent (i.e. needy/poor). She has no money, The bail of $1,500 might as well be $15,000. She’s unlikely to flee. She has a young child. She’s pregnant now.”

    Upon hearing remarks from both sides, the judge decided to release Tsarnaeva without bail.

    Tsarnaeva’s brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, were the two men deemed responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings this April. Tamerlan was killed when he was shot down by police officers and subsequently run over by his brother. Dzhokhar led police on a wild chase, ending several days later when police found him hiding in a boat.

    Currently, Dzhokhar is being charged with brutally murdering two women and a small child; maiming, blinding and deafening scores of others; carjacking a victim and then robbing him; executing a police officer; and then attempting to murder other police officers with bombs and gunfire. If convicted, Dzhokhar faces the death penalty.

    After her brother, Tamerlan, was killed in April, Ailina Tsarnaeva released the following statement: “He was a great person. I thought I knew him. I never would have expected that from him. He is a kind and loving man. The cops took his life away just the same way he took others’ lives away, if that’s even true. At the end of the day, no one knows the truth.”

    Apparently, not even Dzhokhar knows the truth. Despite scrawling a confession on the inside of the boat in which he was found, Dzhokhar is currently claiming innocence for the Boston Marathon bombings. Regardless of his defense, Dzhokhar will most likely receive the death penalty for what federal prosecutors are calling “the most serious terrorist attacks against civilians on American soil since Sept, 11, 2001.”

    Image via YouTube

  • Dollar Counterfeiting: Peru is #1 Worldwide Producer

    In a heavily reprinted AP story out of Lima, a 13-year-old boy was arrested during a raid on a large counterfeiting operation. The boy was caught with almost three quarters of a million in fake dollars and euros; this led to the revelation that Peruvian counterfeiters were finishing each bill by hand.

    The Secret Service claims that, through cheap criminal labor, counterfeiting gangs in Peru have overtaken Columbia as the number one producer of bogus bills in the world. The Service has had to open its fourth permanent office in Latin America to counter the Peruvian counterfeiters; over 50 individuals have since been arrested for counterfeiting.

    The Secret Service estimates the amount of fake money seized from Peruvian counterfeiters at $103 million, and the Peruvian counterfeiting process is often more convincing because they finish each bill by hand. Speaking about one of the seized notes, a Secret Service officer from the U.S. Embassy (who spoke on a condition of anonymity) said that the bill was “a very good note… they [Peruvian counterfeiters] use offset, huge machines that are used for regular printing of newspapers or flyers… [then] once a note is printed they throw five people [at it] and do little things, little touches that add to the quality.”

    The Peruvian bills go just about everywhere, including the States, Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The United States gets counterfeit $100’s, while the rest of the nations get the fake $10’s and $20’s. The chief of the Peruvian police fraud division, Col. Segundo Portocarrero, has said that Peru became attractive to counterfeiters with the United States’ constant interference with Colombian politics through drug interdiction.

    “[Counterfeiting] is more profitable than cocaine,” one of the investigators working for Portocarrero said, an ironic statement considering that Peru has possibly also overtaken Colombia as a cocaine producer.

    If you want to know more, like how Peruvian counterfeiters create their fake income, click here for the NBC News reprint of the AP story.

    [Image via a Youtube video about funny money]

  • White House, IAB, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & AOL Launch Best Practices To Fight Piracy

    The White House’s Office of the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL announced new best practices guidelines for ad networks to address piracy and counterfeiting. The guidelines are designed to help the ad networks regulate themselves.

    Under the guidelines, ad networks will maintain and post policies discouraging or preventing sites that sell counterfeit goods, engage in copyright piracy or otherwise violate laws. They will also accept and process notices from rights holders regarding sites in question, and provide guidance for the content of a “proper” notice, and identify the “designated agent” to receive such a notice.

    “With more than 30 trillion individual pages on the web, online piracy and counterfeit remains a challenge,” said Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Relations at Google. “Google takes that challenge seriously. Using cutting-edge technology like YouTube’s Content ID and innovative copyright removal tools for Web Search, we develop and deploy antipiracy solutions with the support of hundreds of Google employees. In addition to developing legitimate, innovative, and convenient content offerings (such as Google Play and YouTube, through which our partners together generate hundreds of millions of dollars), we continue to develop solutions to help fight piracy and counterfeit online.”

    “We think one of the most effective ways to do this is to cut off the money supply to rogue sites that specialize in piracy or counterfeit,” added Molinari. “To that end, in 2012 we disabled ad serving to 46,000 sites for violating our policies on copyright infringing content and shut down more than 82,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods. Nearly 99% of our account suspensions were discovered through our own detection efforts and risk models.”

    “By working across the industry, these best practices should help reduce the financial incentives for pirate sites by cutting off their revenue supply while maintaining a healthy Internet and promoting innovation,” she said.

    “At Yahoo!, we have worked hard to create top-tier data-driven ad networks. We are dedicated to maintaining high quality standards for advertisers and publishers. We prohibit publishers in our ad networks from selling counterfeit goods or engaging in copyright piracy,” said Yahoo VP of IP Policy, Laura Covington. “Ultimately, we want to create and maintain a healthy online space, promote innovation, and protect intellectual property. The best practices we have committed to will help all of us get there.”

    Fred Humphries, Vice President, U.S. Government Affairs at Microsoft said, “As both a creator of copyrighted works and a provider of online services, including advertising services, Microsoft understands the problems faced by copyright owners subject to massive infringement and the need to ensure that innovation can flourish online. It’s been our experience that a notice-and-takedown mechanism like the one envisioned by these Best Practices can be an effective means to address online infringement. An appropriate notice-and-takedown system – that requires rights holders to identify specific instances of infringement and online services to respond promptly and appropriately to such notices – can address infringement while still respecting critical values such as fair use, privacy, free speech and the freedom to innovate.”

    “AOL has been building trust with our users for more than 28 years,” said Dave Jacobs, SVP, Publisher Sales at AOL Networks. “And we have been equally committed to maintaining high quality standards for advertisers and publishers – taking piracy and counterfeiting seriously. Many of the best practices guidelines very much mirror what we have been doing all along at AOL and, consequently, we quickly supplemented our current practice and are now in compliance with the best practices.”

    “To have the White House stamp of approval is critical as part of the evolution of the IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines and the industry as a whole,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB, in response to the statement from the White House’s Office of U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement. “IAB has served as a big tent where stakeholders across the digital ecosystem, including some of the largest tech companies and intellectual property rights holders, have come together to combat copyright piracy with the speed and urgency that the issue demands. Bringing these disparate parties together at the same table, we have been able to establish guidelines that strictly protect copyrights, while allowing the digital economy to flourish.”

    According to the IAB, many other companies, including 24/7 Media, Adtegrity and SpotXchange are also “reaffirming and extending their commitment” on standards related to intellectual property rights.

    You can take a look at the guidelines here.