New Momentum debuts software to catch the counterfeiters

Enterprise software specialist New Momentum is already a well-recognised player in providing anti-counterfeiting systems for high-tech manufacturers, and has just started targetting the pharmaceutical sector.

Typically, drug companies are hiring private investigators to manually search the Internet and identify transgressors, but this requires a monumental effort in collating and analysing the data.

New Momentum’s software scans the Internet in real time, 24 hours a day, for key search terms - the brand or generic name of a drug, for example - and looks for other clues that could suggest counterfeiting, such as steep price discounting or high levels of sales in an unexpected region.

“It’s very comprehensive,” according to New Momentum’s vice president of marketing Chris Jensen. “The software picks up data from bulletin boards, forums, online auctions and even grey market emails.”

The resulting data is cleansed to take out the duplicates and analysed, and the customer can see at a glance areas of high activity on a customisable dashboard interface (see image below).

The company has completed a pilot study with a top-tier (but unnamed) pharmaceutical company which found its Enterprise Brand software outperformed a leading competitor in identifying one particular product which was subject to considerable counterfeiting over the Internet.

New Momentum’s web-mining software found twice as many counterfeiters in the first eight weeks as the rival system, according to Jensen. Within six weeks, because the software also collates contact data, it was able to identify several large-scale, potential network rings where one individual or group was selling multiple items.

The software was also able to identify grey market transactions - distributors selling genuine medicines across regions with inappropriate price discounts, for example - so can be used by companies to maintain sales channel integrity.



Jensen would not identify the rival software package in the pilot study but said it has the disadvantage of lacking automation, only providing a report weekly or monthly, and requiring a lot of manual intervention.

“That’s not good enough, because a counterfeiter can come on and off the market with 48 hours, and then come out again days later with a different company name and IP address,” she said. “If you’re not in real time, you’re going to miss that activity.”

Of course, identifying the perpetrators is the first step towards tackling the problem, and there have already been good examples where New Momentum’s customers have made use of the data in enforcement actions.

Its customers typically carry out test buys to identify whether the product is in fact counterfeit, and then use various legal measures - either through private or federal suits depending on the size of the operation - to shut them down. The data generated by New Momentum’s software has already been used in court as admissible evidence, she noted.

But not all clients have opted to go down a sometimes lengthy legal route to resolve the problem.

“One high-tech company did something rather unique - they bought large amounts of the counterfeit product themselves and then didn’t pay the bill,” according to Jensen. “In effect they shut them down without resorting to legal action.”

Another non-pharma client offered the counterfeiters the opportunity of becoming a legitimate distributor, she added. And very often, just being found out is sufficient cause for the counterfeiters to stop faking one product and move on to another.

Because Enterprise Brand is software-as-a-service (SaaS), there is no need for companies to embark on a cumbersome deployment exercise. The system is web-based, so it works regardless of the enterprise software a company is running. That also keeps costs down for companies subscribing to the service, according to Jensen.

“There is a very low entry barrier; a small- or mid-sized company could easily get started with our product,” she said. At the moment New Momentum is targetting big pharma - with five companies looking at the system - because they are most affected by counterfeiting.

The firm is also offering access to brand protection personnel as a service for smaller companies that may not have these teams in house.