The paper explains how old fraud prevention technologies which involved analog offerings such as a visual feature such as a hologram, watermark, colour-shifting ink etc no longer work as fraudsters have become more sophisticated.
The paper sums up the new requirements for brand owners as follows:
They require technology that
• “gives them the means to engage with their customers to provide information or reward
• ensures it is executed through a packaging technology that cannot be cloned or reverse-engineered by counterfeiters
• use the reward-information gateway to create a surrogate means for brand protection
• does all this (if possible) without changing or adding anything to the package.
The latter is a highly-coveted requirement not only to contain cost but due to
the very fact that brand owners are averse to placing an extra barcode or any
additional feature onto the artwork of their perfectly designed package.”
Systech Software works as follows:
“The linear barcode that is present on all consumer packages provides the locus for the “covert noise” (the technology). This is the exact solution that has been developed by Systech, providing the only offering where a common feature of the package artwork is used in the “fingerprinting” process.” (“Fingerprinting” means the process of each barcode receiving the unique data for that one individual product)
“As shown in the figure above, Systech places a camera and associated devices needed to image the barcode either on the packaging line or at the package supplier location. Once the barcodes are fingerprinted through Systech’s platform for a given program they are stored in a secure cloud. The products can then be released into the marketplace where both authentication and engagement activities can unfold via a smartphone app.”