Counterfeiters Cost the EU Economy €83 Billion a Year — How the Digital Product Passport Becomes Your Cheapest Brand Protection

In 2024, authorities seized 112 million counterfeit products in the EU's internal market and at its borders, with a total retail value of €3.8 billion — an all-time record. And that's only what got caught. If your product is any good, someone is almost certainly copying it already — or soon will be. The real question isn't whether fakes of your product exist. It's whether your customer can tell the genuine article apart. The Digital Product Passport (DPP) puts exactly that ability in their hands — for next to nothing.

The numbers most manufacturers never talk about

Counterfeiting is not just a luxury-watch-and-designer-handbag problem. According to the joint OECD–EUIPO report Mapping Global Trade in Fakes, published in 2025, global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods reached $467 billion a year based on 2021 data — 2.3% of total world imports. Within imports into the EU, the picture is even worse: an estimated 4.7% of EU imports — roughly $117 billion worth of goods — are fakes.

And what does that mean for European manufacturers? According to the EUIPO's series of sectoral studies, counterfeiting causes around €48 billion in direct lost sales every year in the vulnerable sectors — and once the knock-on effects across supply chains are included, the total loss reaches €83 billion and roughly 790,000 lost jobs a year. In clothing, cosmetics and toys alone, €16 billion in revenue and nearly 200,000 jobs vanish into counterfeiters' pockets every year.

Two details deserve special attention. First, in 2024 the number of seized items actually fell — yet the value still set a record, meaning counterfeiters are moving into ever pricier, ever more "believable" products. Second, according to OECD–EUIPO global figures, around 65% of customs seizures involve small parcels and postal shipments: fakes no longer arrive by the container-load — they land in your customers' mailboxes one webshop order at a time.

"Nobody would copy my product" — oh yes, they would. Yours too

At SME level, counterfeiting rarely shows up as someone seizing a pallet of knock-offs bearing your logo. It takes far more insidious forms:

• Lost customers you never even know about. A shopper buys a cheap copy of your product on a marketplace — they think they bought from you, while you think they simply chose someone else.
• Complaints about products you never made. The fake breaks, fades or causes an allergic reaction — and the customer complains to you and leaves you the one-star review. Your brand absorbs the copy's quality failures.
• Brand erosion. Once originals and copies mingle in the market, sooner or later customers stop paying a premium even for the genuine article. Why would they, if they can't tell the difference?
• Grey imports and channel chaos. Unauthorised resellers and unvetted webshops sell your product — or a copy of it — wrecking your pricing and your warranty system.
• Legal and compliance risk. If a fake "product of yours" causes a safety incident, the burden falls on you to prove you didn't make it. Without evidence, that is a long and expensive fight.

Traditional defences — customs watch applications, litigation, private investigators — are expensive, slow, and always trail behind the damage. Few SMEs have the budget for them. But there is a tool the EU is making mandatory anyway, and which — as a side effect — can become your cheapest brand-protection system.

A change of perspective: the product passport is a weapon, not a burden

Under the ESPR (the EU's ecodesign framework), an ever-widening range of products must carry a Digital Product Passport. Under the parallel Batteries Regulation ((EU) 2023/1542), the battery passport becomes mandatory from 18 February 2027 for EV batteries, light means of transport (LMT) batteries and industrial batteries above 2 kWh — with the ESPR categories (textiles and apparel, furniture, mattresses, tyres, plus iron & steel and aluminium) to follow. Most manufacturers experience this as a compliance burden: yet another database, another QR code, another regulation.

Yet from an anti-counterfeiting standpoint, the DPP is revolutionary: every product gets a unique identifier (UID), and every single item becomes independently verifiable. Behind the QR code lives an official record maintained by the manufacturer — production data, certificates, batch- or even item-level information. A counterfeiter can copy the box, the label, even the QR code graphic. What they cannot copy is the data behind it — data that you control.

From that moment on, verifying authenticity is no longer an expert's job but a three-second gesture with a phone — one your customer, your reseller and the customs officer can all perform. That is why the DPP is not a cost but a competitive advantage.

How does it work in practice?

From the customer's side, the process is dead simple:

1. The customer (or reseller, or inspector) scans the QR code on the product with their phone — no app required.
2. The browser opens the official product passport: product name, manufacturer, batch or serial number, certificates, photos.
3. They compare what they see with the product in their hands: does a passport even exist for this identifier, and do the details match? If the code leads nowhere, or the colour, size or batch number doesn't add up — it's a fake.

The key is the depth of identification. The GS1 Digital Link standard was built for exactly this: the same URL structure carries the product type (GTIN), the production batch (lot) and the unique serial number (serial). The deeper the identification, the harder the counterfeiter's job:

At item level, the counterfeiter faces an unsolvable dilemma. Print a made-up serial number, and the code leads nowhere — instant exposure. Copy the code of one genuine item a thousand times, and the same serial number starts generating scans from a thousand different places — a pattern that screams, statistically speaking.

Scan analytics as an early-warning system

This is where something most manufacturers never even think about comes in: every QR scan is data. Who viewed your passport, when, from which country, on what device? Under normal conditions, scan traffic follows your sales map. When it deviates, that's an alarm:

• The same serial number scanned from hundreds of different locations. One item exists in one place — if its code gets scanned from 500 different cities, that code has been cloned.
• A sudden scan spike from a country you don't ship to. If you have no distribution in, say, South America, yet scans pour in from there, someone is selling "your product" there.
• Queries hitting non-existent batch or serial numbers. Someone is probing with invented identifiers — which means they are already printing fake labels.
• Disproportionate traffic on a single batch. If the passport of a 500-unit batch gets opened ten thousand times, something is off.

This is effectively a counterfeiting hotspot map drawing itself in real time — at zero extra cost, since you are building the passport infrastructure for compliance anyway. Traditional brand protection reacts years after the damage; scan analytics flags it weeks after the fakes hit the market. Armed with that information, you can act with precision: marketplace takedown requests, a customs watch application for the affected country, cease-and-desist letters — not blindly, but with data in hand.

What can an SME do today? Item-level protection, step by step

You don't need a million-euro anti-counterfeiting system to get started. A realistic path for an SME:

1. Assess where you stand. Do you have consistent product identifiers (GTINs)? Can you trace production at batch level? A free DPP readiness test reveals the gaps in five minutes.
2. Create your product passports — first at model level, with the mandatory and the trust-building data (manufacturer, composition, certificates, photos).
3. Move to batch-level, then item-level identification for your critical products. With QR codes structured as GS1 Digital Links, this isn't a separate system — just deeper addressing of the same passport.
4. Make the QR code clearly visible on the product or packaging, and tell your customers about it: "Scan it — make sure you bought the real thing." Verifiability only protects you if buyers know it exists.
5. Watch your scan data weekly or monthly: country breakdown, devices, outlier batches. Anomalies are your friends — the sooner you spot them, the cheaper they are to deal with.
6. Document tamper-proof. A versioned, cryptographically chained passport history serves as evidence in disputes (complaints, regulatory proceedings, marketplace conflicts) of what you published and when.

For the deadlines and which categories become mandatory when, our ESPR deadlines guide lays out the full timeline — but from a brand-protection standpoint, there is no point waiting for the mandatory date. Every month your products remain unverifiable is free rein for the copycats.

How does Veridyn help?

We built the Veridyn platform so that, alongside compliance, you can switch on the brand-protection side from day one:

• Passports with unique identifiers, no coding: create product passports in a category-schema editor at model, batch and item level — no developer needed.
• QR + GS1 Digital Link: we generate standards-based QR codes ready for lot/serial-level addressing, scannable with any phone, no app required.
• Scan analytics dashboard: scan trends broken down by country and device, with bot filtering — suspicious patterns (spikes from unexpected countries, outlier batches) stand out at a glance.
• Version history + hash chain: every passport change goes into a tamper-proof log — in a dispute, you can prove what you published and when.
• Document uploads: certificates and declarations of conformity attached directly to the passport — something a counterfeiter cannot reproduce.
• Public passports in 24 EU languages: your customers verify authenticity in their own language, from Lisbon to Helsinki.
• REST API + webhooks: pipe scan and passport data into your own systems, even with automated alerts.

See it in action in our public live demo, or gauge your own readiness in five minutes with the free DPP readiness test. And when you're ready to start, the free starter plan lets you create your first verifiable product passport today — before the counterfeiters create their own version for you.