The replica watch industry is in its “super clone” era. Following tips from murky internet forums, we bought three budget fakes that were good enough to pass as real—but ultimately disposable.
There is a place where you can custom order forgeries of nearly any official document you desire. It’s cheap, fast and, of course, illegal.
Nearly all the world’s counterfeits come from China. Pinkerton is on the case.
On the trail of the world’s best counterfeit artists.
Art authentication is a complex process meant to verify and understand the origin of an artwork. The three main tools are connoisseurship, technical analysis, and provenance research.
What if every viral song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama in recent memory was the result of a stealth marketing campaign?
Most of what we see online is a copy of something else. There’s a whole ecosystem of influencers who focus their content on findings dupes of something else, and brands hawking dupes as a marketing tactic. When everything is the same, who gets to claim ownership over ideas?
The history of archeological discovery is riddled with forgeries. Discover three famous archeological hoaxes and the lessons they teach us about discovery and deception.
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A new show at London's Courtauld Gallery will explore the value of counterfeit art
When a Harlem 20-something answered a Craigslist ad, he had no idea he was about to become a dealer of illegal ghost plates.
Can you tell the difference between a $10,000 Chanel bag and a $200 knockoff? Almost nobody can, and it’s turning luxury fashion upside down.
It's easy for an open-source project to buy fake GitHub stars. We share two approaches for detecting them.
A collector thought he had bought a painting by the celebrated British artist. How far would he go to prove it?
LinkedIn users are being scammed of millions of dollars by fake connections posing as graduates of prestigious universities and employees at top tech companies.
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‘Faking your own death is a full-time job, and I can guarantee you that if you slip up with even the slightest sign of life, we will find you’.
When “faking it before making it” actually works
Reddit has never been a place where you could necessarily connect one user with one account. Parody accounts are commonplace -- to a fault if you ask some -- and there have been more than one fiasco involving users who pretend to be different people with different accounts; it's…
Counterfeit goods have proliferated along with e-commerce. Here’s your primer on the growing world of fake products—and the forces working to combat them.
A photographer set out to capture the misinformation producers in a small town in Macedonia. He wound up revealing uncomfortable truths about his own profession.
How a dozen possibly fraudulent and forged Indigenous artworks left Texas and ended up on museum walls in Wyoming.
Nearly all the world’s counterfeits come from China. Pinkerton is on the case.