Authenticate · Verify · Trace

Proof that stays with the object.

Counterfeiting is a 467-billion-dollar industry, and every defence against it can be printed, copied or swapped. A watch, a graded card, a canvas, an identity card, a registration plate, a batch of medicine. Veyra binds authenticity to the object itself, so anyone holding it can confirm what it is in under a second, without expertise.

Request a demo See the scale of the problem
01 Patents granted in the United States and the European Union
02 Ongoing academic research partnership
03 Swiss-based · working reader and registry prototype

Why Veyra

We build the defence that cannot be copied.

Counterfeiting is a global industry with its own supply chains, its own economics and its own R&D. It stays ahead for one structural reason: every safeguard built to stop it is, without exception, a thing that can be reproduced. Veyra exists to end that.

$467bn
The estimated value of counterfeit goods in global trade. That is 2.3% of everything the world imports, and 4.7% of everything entering the European Union. OECD / EUIPO · Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025

European Union

$117bn

The value of counterfeit goods entering the EU in a single year, or 4.7% of everything the Union imports, twice the global average.

OECD / EUIPO · Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025

Medicines

1 in 10

Medical products in low- and middle-income countries are substandard or falsified. UN figures attribute 267,000 deaths a year to falsified antimalarials in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

WHO · UNODC, 2023

What it costs you

Trust

The damage lands on the brand, not the forger. Once buyers stop believing a certificate means anything, the whole secondary market reprices, genuine goods included.

The reason this problem compounds

The full picture, from AI forgery to the EU passport rules

The new problem

AI made forgery free.
It cannot make anything authentic.

A convincing identity document now costs about fifteen dollars and half an hour. A painting in a dead artist's style, and the provenance letters to go with it, take a prompt. Generative models are built to reproduce appearance, which is the one thing every safeguard in use today is built to judge.

Veyra does not judge appearance. There is no image of a Veyra Tag to generate, and no visual answer to the question it asks. That is the whole point.

How AI changed the problem

$15Cost of producing an AI-generated identity document, start to finish.Sumsub, 2026
1 in 100Identity checks that now fail on a deepfake document or video, with attacks up 180% in a year.LexisNexis Risk Solutions, 2026
×16Growth in deepfakes circulating in the UK between 2023 and 2025, on government estimates.UK government projection

The approach

Not a code to copy. A physical fact to read.

Every mark in common use, from holograms and certificate numbers to QR codes and chips, is information applied to an object, and information can be reproduced. A Veyra Tag carries no information at all. Its identity comes from microscopic variation locked into the material as it is made, which is why no two tags are alike and why no process can produce the same one twice.

We are not asking anyone to abandon the code. A Veyra deployment keeps the QR code that carries the record, and adds the thing the code has never been able to supply: proof that the object holding it is the object the record describes.

Unclonable by construction

The signature is a consequence of what the tag is, not of anything written onto it. There is no master file, no key and no pattern to steal. Even we cannot manufacture the same tag a second time. That is the point, not a limitation.

Bound to the object

Thin enough to sit inside a sealed case, under a label or within the body of a product. Verifying the tag verifies what it was sealed with, not a record that claims to describe it.

A plain answer

The reader returns one of two results: this is the object that was registered, or it is not. No interpretation, no expert eye, no waiting for a laboratory.

How it works

Place, Read, Authenticate.

Four steps, and only the first ever happens twice.

Place the Tag

A Veyra Tag is fitted to the object, inside the case, under the label or within the body of the product, at the moment its authenticity is established.

Register its signature

The reader captures the signature the tag produces and ties it to that specific object. From then on, the two are one record.

Read it anywhere

Whoever is holding the object passes the reader over it. The signature is read directly from the tag, in under a second, with no laboratory and no expert.

Get a plain answer

The app returns one of two results: this signature belongs to this object, or it does not. Every check is added to the object's history, so provenance accumulates instead of resetting at each resale.

See the whole chain, and whether it can be beaten

Get in touch

See it read an object.

The fastest way to understand what this is: put something in front of the reader and watch it answer. We run demonstrations for issuers, authenticators and brand-protection teams.

Request a demo Ask a technical question

Veyra Tech  /  How it works

Place, Read, Authenticate.

Veyra is not a scanner. It is a chain that starts when an object's authenticity is first established and holds for the rest of that object's life. Here is the whole of it, and the two questions everyone asks next.

How it works

Place, Read, Authenticate.

Four steps, and only the first ever happens twice.

Place the Tag

A Veyra Tag is fitted to the object, inside the case, under the label or within the body of the product, at the moment its authenticity is established.

Register its signature

The reader captures the signature the tag produces and ties it to that specific object. From then on, the two are one record.

Read it anywhere

Whoever is holding the object passes the reader over it. The signature is read directly from the tag, in under a second, with no laboratory and no expert.

Get a plain answer

The app returns one of two results: this signature belongs to this object, or it does not. Every check is added to the object's history, so provenance accumulates instead of resetting at each resale.

Question one

Can the Tag be copied?

No, and the reason is worth being precise about, because "unclonable" is a word this industry has worn out.

There is nothing written on it

A QR code, a chip and a certificate number all carry information that was chosen and applied. Anything chosen can be chosen again. A Veyra Tag carries no information at all: its signature is a consequence of microscopic variation locked into the material as it was formed.

Nobody controls that variation, including us

We cannot manufacture two tags alike, and neither can anyone else, because the variation happens at a scale the process does not steer. That is not a safeguard we added. It is a property of the material we chose the material for.

Reading one does not help you build one

Give a counterfeiter unlimited access to a genuine tag and they can measure its signature perfectly. It gets them nowhere. Knowing what a fingerprint looks like has never been a method for growing that finger.

The honest version

No one should claim a physical object is beyond the reach of a state laboratory with unlimited time. What we claim is narrower and testable: reproducing a Veyra Tag requires controlling matter at a scale where the manufacturing process itself has no control, which puts it outside the reach of the operations that actually produce counterfeits, at any price those operations can justify.

Question two

Then can it be stolen, or moved to a fake?

This is the sharper question, and the one that decides whether the whole system holds. If a tag cannot be copied but can be lifted off a genuine object and stuck onto a counterfeit, nothing has been gained. Three things prevent it.

Where possible, it goes inside

In an object built around it, the tag is fitted during manufacture: within the case back, inside the moulding, embedded in the paper as it is made. Recovering it means destroying the object it was protecting, which leaves the counterfeiter with a broken original and nothing to sell.

Where it must be applied later, it is built to break

Some objects already exist and cannot be opened, so the tag is mounted such that any attempt to lift, heat, dissolve or pry it destroys it. A destroyed tag produces no signature at all, so the transfer fails and the attempt is self-evident.

The registry ties it to one object

Even a tag moved intact would not help. Its signature is registered against a specific object, so on anything else it reads as the wrong object rather than as authentic. Moving a tag turns a convincing fake into an obvious one.

Which applies to your case

The right answer depends on the object, and it is a conversation rather than a catalogue choice. A watch case, a sealed grading holder, a document made from pulp and a pharmaceutical carton each impose different constraints on where a tag can sit and how it should fail. That assessment is part of what a pilot establishes.

Get in touch

Try to beat it.

The fastest way to trust any of this is to test it. Bring us the object you care about and the attack you are worried about, and we will show you what the reader does.

Request a demo See it sector by sector

Veyra Tech  /  Why Veyra

Counterfeiting is an industry, and it is outgrowing its defences.

It has its own supply chains, its own economics and its own R&D. It stays ahead for one structural reason: every safeguard built to stop it is, without exception, a thing that can be reproduced. Veyra Tech was founded to remove that weakness. This page sets out the scale of what we work against, and where each existing safeguard gives way.

$467bn
The estimated value of counterfeit goods in global trade. That is 2.3% of everything the world imports, and 4.7% of everything entering the European Union. OECD / EUIPO · Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025

European Union

$117bn

The value of counterfeit goods entering the EU in a single year, or 4.7% of everything the Union imports, twice the global average.

OECD / EUIPO · Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025

Medicines

1 in 10

Medical products in low- and middle-income countries are substandard or falsified. UN figures attribute 267,000 deaths a year to falsified antimalarials in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

WHO · UNODC, 2023

Identity documents

22,395

Fraudulent identity and travel documents detected at the EU's external borders in one year, carried by more than 17,400 people, and those are only the ones that were caught.

Frontex, 2023

Fine art

Contested

A Geneva institute once put the share of forged or misattributed works on the market at 50%. Dealers call that wildly high. Nobody can settle it, which is the problem.

Fine Art Expert Institute · disputed by trade sources

The pattern

Certified

Counterfeiters no longer copy the object alone. They copy the proof: real certificate numbers lifted and reprinted, authentic seals reused, sealed cases opened and refilled.

Documented across grading, art and luxury

What it costs you

Trust

The damage lands on the brand, not the forger. Once buyers stop believing a certificate means anything, the whole secondary market reprices, genuine goods included.

The reason this problem compounds

Sources: OECD/EUIPO, Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025 (2021 customs data) · World Health Organization, Substandard and falsified medical products · UNODC, 2023 · Frontex, document fraud detections 2023 · Fine Art Expert Institute, Geneva. Full source list.

Why it holds

Where the existing defences give way.

Counterfeiters have caught up with every layer built on printing or on a lookup. The failure is not that those methods are badly made. It is that all of them can, in principle, be reproduced.

Method
How it fails
Copyable
Hologram / security seal
Reproduced by well-equipped operations; the copy passes visual inspection.
Yes
Certificate number
A real number is lifted from a genuine item and reprinted. The online check returns valid.
Yes
QR code / NFC chip, on its own
Carries data, and data can be photographed and reprinted onto another object, which then inherits a valid record.
Yes
Sealed case
Opened, contents swapped, resealed. The seal and label stay authentic, the contents do not.
Yes
Veyra Tag, behind the code
Nothing is encoded, so there is nothing to lift. Reproducing the signature would mean reproducing the tag itself.
No

Regulation

What the Digital Product Passport does not answer.

From 2027, a growing list of products sold in the European Union must carry a Digital Product Passport: a structured record of identity, composition, durability and end-of-life data, reached through a data carrier on the product itself. Batteries first, then textiles, aluminium, tyres, furniture, electronics and construction materials through to 2030. It is not optional, and it is not far away.

What the regulation asks, and what it does not

The passport answers what is this product made of, and what happens to it next. That is a question about data, and the regulation handles it well. As the framework stands today it does not address a different one: is the object in my hand the one this passport describes?

The gap is structural, not an oversight. A passport is reached through a data carrier, usually a printed code. Published research is blunt about what that means: a QR code by itself offers no protection at all against copying by cloning.[13]

Photograph the code on a genuine product, print it on a counterfeit, and the counterfeit now carries a passport that is valid, compliant, and wrong. Every provider in this market has that hole, and no amount of software closes it, because the software never sees the object.

Where Veyra fits

We do not replace the code, and we do not carry the passport's data. A deployment keeps the QR code that leads to the record and adds a Veyra Tag inside the object, so the two are bound together. Scanning the code retrieves the record; reading the tag confirms that this object is the one the record was created for. A cloned code on a counterfeit fails immediately, because the counterfeit has no tag to read.

To be exact about the boundary: material composition, repairability and end-of-life data are the passport's business, not ours. As the framework stands today, the regulation asks what a product is made of and what happens to it next. It does not ask whether the object in front of you is the one the passport describes. That is the question Veyra answers.

For brands

The passport you are required to provide and the authentication you actually want can sit on the same object, read in the same gesture, instead of being two unrelated systems bolted on separately.

For passport providers

A physical anchor you can offer alongside your platform, for the customers who ask what stops someone copying the code. Today that question has no good answer.

Digital Product Passport requirements are set by the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, with the first binding deadline of 18 February 2027 for certain battery categories under Regulation (EU) 2023/1542. Product categories and their data requirements are set by sector-specific delegated acts, adopted progressively through 2030. This page describes the framework as it stands at the time of writing.

What changed in 2025

The forger now costs fifteen dollars.

Counterfeiting used to be limited by skill. Producing a convincing identity document meant equipment, practice and time, and that friction kept the volume down. Generative AI removed the friction. A fake that once took an expert hours now takes a prompt, and the result is good enough to pass a check made by a human eye or by software looking at an image.

3,892%
Projected year-on-year growth in AI-generated document fraud in 2026, the fastest-moving category in the dataset, annualised from five months of data. Shufti · Identity Fraud Index 2026 (estimate)

Cost of a forgery

$15

What it now takes to produce an AI-generated identity document, or about half an hour of work, with no craft skill and no equipment.

Sumsub, 2026

Detection rate

1 in 100

Identity check failures now involve a deepfake document, image or liveness video, against a 180% year-on-year rise in attacks. Passports, driving licences and national IDs are the most targeted.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, 2026

Volume

×16

Growth in deepfakes circulating in the UK between 2023 and 2025, from roughly 500,000 to a projected 8 million, on government estimates.

UK government projection, cited 2025

Why this breaks appearance-based checks specifically

Every safeguard in wide use asks the same question: does this look right? A guard examines a hologram. A camera reads a document. A model scores an image. All three are judgements about appearance, and appearance is exactly what generative models are built to reproduce.

This is why the trend does not plateau. Each improvement in generation quality is immediately available to everyone, at no cost, while each improvement in detection has to be built, deployed and paid for. The attacker's side of that race compounds; the defender's does not.

Where Veyra stands

A Veyra Tag is not read by looking at it, and there is no image of it to generate. Verification does not ask whether something looks authentic. It asks whether this specific physical object is the one that was registered. That question has no visual answer, so there is nothing for a generative model to produce.

Worth being precise: most published AI-fraud figures come from remote identity verification, where a document is photographed and uploaded. Veyra addresses the physical document in the hand. The two are different attack surfaces, but they fail for the same reason, which is that both are judged on appearance.

The cost you cannot invoice

The damage lands on you, not on the forger.

A counterfeit does not only take a sale. It takes the meaning out of the thing you use to prove you are not one, and that loss is not recoverable by catching the individual responsible.

The market reprices everything

Once buyers stop believing a certificate means anything, they discount every certificate, including the ones covering genuine goods. Your authentic stock is worth less because somebody else's fakes exist.

Verification moves to the buyer

When the seal is no longer trusted, buyers build their own checks: forums, third-party opinions, refusal to buy without physical inspection. Every one of those adds friction to your legitimate sales.

Enforcement never catches up

Seizures rise every year and so does the trade. Interdiction is a tax on counterfeiters, not a barrier, because the economics only change when the copy stops working.

Get in touch

Make the copy stop working.

Every method on this page fails for the same reason: it can be reproduced. Ours cannot. We run demonstrations for issuers, authenticators and brand-protection teams.

Request a demo See it sector by sector

Veyra Tech  /  About

A Swiss deep-tech company.

Veyra Tech was founded to close a gap everyone in the trade already knows about: the proof of an object's identity almost never lives on the object. It lives on paper, in a database, or in the reputation of whoever is selling it.

What we build

The physics is settled. The engineering is not.

The behaviour our tags rely on has been studied and published for decades. Nobody has needed to argue about whether it works.

What has never been solved is everything around it: reading it reliably outside a laboratory, in a device somebody can hold, in a shop or at a border or on a factory line, at a cost that makes sense when it is applied to every object rather than to a research sample. That gap is the company.

It is deliberately unglamorous work: power budgets, tolerances, enclosure design, the difference between a result that is right in a controlled room and one that is right in the world. It is also the only part that decides whether any of this reaches a customer.

Intellectual property
Patents granted in the United States and the European UnionCovering the sensing approach and its analysis
Research partner
Academic research group, MadridOngoing collaboration on material characterisation
Founding team
Physics, embedded systems and dataIncluding a PhD with CNRS and CERN background
Current stage
Working reader, authentication app and secure registryMoving from prototype toward an industrialised device
Based in
SwitzerlandCompany incorporation in progress

How we work

Three commitments.

Anti-counterfeiting is a field with a long history of overstated claims. These are the constraints we hold ourselves to, and the ones you should hold any supplier to.

A false positive is the only unacceptable failure

A system that occasionally fails to recognise a genuine object is inconvenient. A system that occasionally validates a fake is worse than no system, because it launders the counterfeit. We tune for the first and never trade it against the second.

No claim we cannot demonstrate

We would rather show you a reader working on your own objects than send you a specification sheet. Where the technology has limits, we would rather tell you before you find them.

Built to be checked, not trusted

The point of the product is that verification does not depend on believing us, or on believing the seller. It depends on the object. That principle governs how the system is designed.

Get in touch

Talk to us.

Whether you are evaluating the technology, exploring a pilot, or researching in an adjacent field, we would rather have the conversation early than late.

Request a demo Ask a technical question

Veyra Tech  /  Use cases

Where proof and object come apart.

Counterfeiting is not one problem. It takes a different shape in every sector, costs a different kind of damage, and defeats a different safeguard. What these cases share is the failure point: the thing meant to prove authenticity is separable from the object it describes. They are illustrations of where the technology applies, chosen because the problem is documented, and not an exhaustive list. If your sector is not here, the question is worth asking anyway.

Sector 01

Watches, jewellery & luxury

The most counterfeited category in the world, and the one where the paperwork has become worth more than the object.

A luxury watch is authenticated today by a warranty card, a serial number and a box. All three are separable from the watch. A card can be sold on its own. A serial can be transcribed onto a replica. A box can be bought empty. The secondary market has quietly priced this in: a piece sold "full set" commands a premium precisely because buyers know the papers are the weak point.

And the object itself is now the harder problem. The era of the obvious replica is over: counterfeiters run CNC machines and 3D printers, and the best of what the trade calls "superfakes" defeat inspection by people who do this for a living. In one documented case the fakes were built on genuine Swiss ébauche movements, the same base calibres the brand itself modifies, and only the engraving, the finishing and the movement graining gave them away. One specialist marketplace rejected 29% of the watches submitted to it in a single year.[11]

A watch that passes a trained eye, a loupe and a movement inspection cannot be caught by looking harder. That is the ceiling of visual authentication, and the market has reached it.

The card, the box and the certificate all move more easily than the watch they describe.

What changes

The proof stops being a document that travels separately and becomes part of the piece itself. A buyer verifies the watch, not its paperwork, and a full set with the wrong watch inside no longer passes.

87%

Share of all global seizures of counterfeit goods infringing Swiss intellectual property that were watches.

OECD, 2020 to 2021 seizure data [2]

$1.88bn

Trade value of fake watches infringing Swiss brands in a single year, or 7.7% of the value of Switzerland's legitimate watch exports.

OECD [2]

29%

Share of watches rejected by one specialist authentication marketplace in a year for failing its standards. An estimated 40 million counterfeit watches are sold worldwide annually.

Bezel · Havocscope [11]

6,000+

Jobs lost in Switzerland to counterfeiting in one year, alongside roughly $3bn in foregone sales across Swiss industry.

OECD [2]

$467bn

Total counterfeit goods in global trade: 2.3% of world imports, and 4.7% of everything entering the EU.

OECD / EUIPO [1]

Sector 02

Graded collectibles

The industry that exists to certify authenticity is now the industry being counterfeited.

Grading was supposed to close this problem. A card is examined, sealed in a tamper-evident case, given a grade and a certificate number, and from then on it trades on that verdict. It worked, until forgers moved up a level and started copying the case rather than the card.

Three techniques now circulate. Counterfeit slabs reproduce the holograms, the sonic weld and the embossed certificate number. Cloned certificate numbers are lifted from genuine items, so the online lookup returns a valid result for a fake. And rebacking opens a real case, swaps the card, and reseals it. The label stays authentic, the contents do not.

Empty cases in the style of the major graders are sold online in bulk, by the thousand. The largest grading service documents all of this publicly, and notes that its cases are tamper-evident rather than tamper-proof.[8]

The certificate is real. The lookup says valid. The card inside is a different card.

What changes

The seal becomes unforgeable and the swap becomes detectable. A case that has been opened and refilled no longer matches its record, however perfect the label and hologram are.

$200m+

Counterfeits intercepted by a single grading service in one year, described by its own president as a conservative estimate.

Industry fraud report, 2025 [6]

+45%

Year-on-year rise in counterfeit submissions across all categories. Trading-card submissions in one franchise rose 125%.

Industry fraud report, 2025 [6]

92%

Counterfeit rate on submissions of one landmark vintage card. Another well-known card runs at roughly 62%.

Industry fraud report, 2025 [6]

$2m

Loss in a single US federal fraud case built on cleaning genuine grading labels and reprinting them with false grades and serial numbers.

US Attorney's Office, 2026 [7]

Sector 03

Fine art & antiquities

The only market where nobody can tell you how big the problem is, and that is the finding.

A Geneva laboratory once estimated that half the works circulating on the market were forged or misattributed. Dealers pushed back hard, one putting the real figure "well under 2 percent". Both sides have a point, and neither can prove it, because there is no way to count fakes that have not been caught.

That uncertainty is itself the damage. Authentication rests on connoisseurship, meaning an expert looks at the work and gives an opinion, supported by provenance documents that are themselves forgeable, and have been forged, repeatedly and successfully, for decades.

Generative models have been trained on every major artist's body of work and will produce a convincing pastiche on request, together with the letters, photographs and sale records a plausible provenance requires. Forging the work and forging its history are now the same afternoon's effort.

The forgeries themselves are the other half of the problem, and they are better than the market likes to admit. In the Knoedler affair, one man painting in a garage in Queens produced around sixty canvases in the manner of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning and Motherwell. A gallery more than a century old sold them for roughly $80 million over fourteen years, and closed when it came apart. A forensic analyst later found the evidence in a single Rothko in about an hour.[12]

That last detail is the one worth sitting with. The science was never the obstacle. Nobody ran it, because the paperwork looked right and the story held.

When a forgery is exposed, the loss falls on whoever currently holds the work.

Provenance is a paper trail. Paper trails can be written.And the best forgers wrote them first

What changes

Authentication happens once, by whoever is qualified to give it, and from that moment it is attached to the physical work rather than to a file about the work. The opinion stops being re-litigated at every sale.

To be clear about the limit: nothing stops a model from painting in an artist's style. What it cannot do is make the result the registered work, and a canvas with no tag has nothing to claim.

50%

Share of works on the market estimated to be forged or misattributed by a Geneva expert institute, a figure the trade disputes as far too high.

Fine Art Expert Institute [5]

<2%

The counter-estimate from a long-standing dealer, drawing a distinction between fakes and deliberate forgeries.

Trade sources [5]

$80m

Value of forged works sold by a single New York gallery over fourteen years, painted by one forger. Around sixty canvases, attributed to Pollock, Rothko and others.

US federal prosecutors [12]

1 hour

Time a forensic analyst needed to establish that an $8m "Rothko" was a forgery, once somebody finally thought to test it.

Reported coverage [12]

Unknowable

The honest answer. No mechanism exists to establish the true rate, which is why estimates span a factor of twenty-five.

The state of the evidence

Sector 04

Identity & official documents

Identity cards, driving licences, residence permits and diplomas, all checked in seconds, by eye, by someone who is not a specialist.

Modern identity documents carry serious security features. The problem is where they are checked: at a counter, a border desk, an HR office, a car rental hire desk, by a person with a few seconds, no equipment, and no way to escalate. The features exist; the verification does not.

Networks producing forgeries good enough to pass that check have been dismantled repeatedly in Europe. In one case, documents were priced between €400 and €1,200 and described by investigators as especially difficult to detect.

Generative AI has removed the last constraint on the supply side. A document that once demanded craft and equipment now costs about $15 and half an hour, and it looks right. Any check that works by examining appearance is on the losing side of that curve.[10]

And the hardest case is not the forgery at all: it is a genuine document presented by somebody it does not belong to.

The features are excellent. The check at the counter is three seconds and a glance.

What changes

Verification stops depending on the examiner's training. Anyone with a reader gets the same answer as a forensic document specialist, at the counter, in about a second.

22,395

Fraudulent identity and travel documents detected at the EU's external borders in a single year.

Frontex, 2023 [3]

17,424

People detected using or carrying those documents, counting only the ones stopped at a border.

Frontex, 2023 [3]

€400 to €1,200

Price range for forged EU identity documents in one dismantled network, whose output was described as especially hard to detect.

Europol [3]

1 in 100

Identity check failures now involve a deepfake document, image or liveness video, against a 180% year-on-year rise in attacks.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, 2026 [10]

Sector 05

Vehicle registration plates

The rare case where the counterfeit costs nothing to make, and the damage lands entirely on somebody innocent.

A cloned plate is a legitimate registration copied onto a different vehicle. Every offence that vehicle commits, from speeding to tolls to congestion charges and worse, is attributed to the registered keeper of the original. Most victims find out when the fines start arriving, and are then in the position of having to prove they were somewhere else.

The supply side is the striking part. In the UK, tens of thousands of suppliers are registered to manufacture plates, many operating from homes or small workshops with no background checks, and enforcement fines are described as too small to deter anyone.

A cross-party parliamentary report recommended a redesign of plates to carry overt and covert markings that would make them hard to fake and traceable to their origin. That recommendation describes, almost exactly, what a Veyra Tag does.

A cloned plate sends the fines, the tolls and sometimes the criminal record to a driver who was never there.

What changes

A plate carries a covert marking bound to its registration at manufacture. A roadside or ANPR-linked check separates a genuine plate from a copy, and an unregistered plate has no origin to claim.

11,394

Drivers who reported their plate cloned in the UK in one year, a 54% rise since the start of the decade.

DVLA [4]

+64%

Rise in plate-cloning cases in London over three years, as camera-based enforcement expanded.

Transport for London [4]

34,455

Suppliers registered to manufacture UK plates, many of them from private homes, with no background checks.

APPG for Transport Safety [4]

Recommended

A parliamentary report has called for plates carrying overt and covert insignia to stop them being faked and to trace their origin.

APPG for Transport Safety [4]

Sector 06

Regulated supply chains

Medicines, aerospace and automotive components, where a counterfeit is a safety failure, not a commercial one.

In every other sector on this page, the worst outcome is that somebody loses money. Here it is measured in lives. A falsified medicine may contain no active ingredient, the wrong dose, or something actively harmful, and it enters legitimate distribution alongside genuine stock, in packaging designed to be indistinguishable.

The trend is the wrong way: reports of substandard and falsified incidents to the WHO doubled between 2019 and 2023. The same logic applies to certified components, where a part that looks correct and carries correct paperwork can fail in service.

Serialisation and 2D codes were the regulatory answer. They work against casual copying and not at all against a counterfeiter who reads a code off a genuine pack and prints it onto ten thousand others. Medicines sit outside the EU's new passport rules, which explicitly exclude them, so that regulation will not close this particular gap. For the certified components alongside them, it will apply, and it will carry the same weakness.[13]

Here the cost of a fake is not a refund. It is a patient who was never treated.

What changes

Verification becomes possible at the point of dispensing or installation, not only at the point of manufacture, and a copied code stops being enough, because the code was never what proved anything.

1 in 10

Medical products in low- and middle-income countries are substandard or falsified.

World Health Organization [9]

267,000

Annual deaths attributed to falsified antimalarial drugs in sub-Saharan Africa, plus 169,000 from fake antibiotics for childhood pneumonia.

UNODC, 2023 [9]

18.7%

Estimated prevalence of falsified and substandard medicines in Africa, nearly double the average across low- and middle-income countries.

Reported to the World Health Assembly [9]

×2

Substandard and falsified incidents reported to the WHO in 2023, compared with 2019.

WHO [9]

Sector 07

Products under the EU passport rules

The only sector on this page where the buyer has no choice about acting, and a date in the calendar.

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation has been in force since July 2024. It applies to almost every physical product placed on the EU market, including components and intermediate goods, with a short list of exclusions: food, feed, medicines and living organisms. Everything else enters scope as its category's delegated act is adopted, through to 2030.

Each covered product must carry a data carrier, in practice a QR code, resolving to a passport that holds its identity, composition, durability and end-of-life data. Batteries are first, with a binding date of 18 February 2027. Textiles, furniture, iron and steel, aluminium, tyres, electronics and construction products follow.

Which means that within a few years, a very large share of European manufacturing will be printing a unique code on every unit it makes. Those codes will be scanned by customers, resellers, recyclers and customs. And a printed code, on its own, offers no protection against being copied onto something else.[13]

A counterfeit carrying a copied code arrives with a passport that is valid, well-formed, and describing a different object.

What changes

The passport keeps doing its job, which is to carry the data the regulation asks for. A Veyra Tag inside the product answers the question the passport was never designed to answer: whether this object is the one the record was written for. The code is scanned, the tag is read, and a copied code has nothing behind it.

Where this makes sense, and where it does not

Physical authentication has a cost per object, and that cost has to be proportionate to what the object is worth. A certified component, a piece of electronics, a battery pack or a premium good carries it comfortably. A commodity textile at ten euros does not, and we would rather say so than pretend the arithmetic works everywhere.

So this is not a claim that every passport should have a tag behind it. It is a statement about the ones where the cost of a convincing counterfeit is high enough that proving the object matters.

18 Feb 2027

First binding passport deadline, for certain industrial, EV and light-transport batteries under the separate Batteries Regulation.

Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 [13]

2025 to 2030

Rollout window for the priority groups: textiles, furniture, iron and steel, aluminium, tyres, electronics and construction products.

ESPR working plan [13]

Almost all

Physical products placed on the EU market fall within scope, components and intermediate goods included. Food, feed, medicines and living organisms are excluded.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, Art. 1 [13]

No protection

What a QR code offers by itself against copying by cloning, in the words of published research on document security.

ACM Symposium on Document Engineering [13]

Sources

Every figure on this page is drawn from a published source. Where an estimate is contested or projected, we say so alongside the number rather than in a footnote.

  1. Global and EU counterfeit trade. OECD/EUIPO (2025), Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025: Global Trends and Enforcement Challenges, OECD Publishing, Paris. Based on 2021 customs seizure data. doi.org/10.1787/94d3b29f-en
  2. Swiss economy and watchmaking. OECD (2025), Counterfeiting, Piracy and the Swiss Economy 2025, OECD Publishing, Paris. USD 4.7bn in counterfeits infringing Swiss IPR, USD 3bn in lost sales, over 6,000 jobs, watchmaking the worst-affected sector. doi.org/10.1787/6d206067-en
  3. Identity and travel document fraud. Frontex, detections at the EU's external borders, 2023: 17,424 people using or carrying 22,395 fraudulent documents. Europol, dismantled forgery network, document prices of EUR 400 to EUR 1,200. frontex.europa.eu
  4. Vehicle registration plates. DVLA cloning reports (11,394 in one year, up 54% since 2020); Transport for London enforcement data; All-Party Parliamentary Group for Transport Safety report on registration plates, including the recommendation for overt and covert markings and the figure of 34,455 registered plate suppliers. Reported coverage
  5. Art forgery estimates. Fine Art Expert Institute, Geneva, as reported by AFP: up to 50% of works on the market forged or misattributed. Counter-estimates from trade sources place the figure below 2%. We present both because the disagreement is the point. artnet
  6. Graded collectibles. PSA 2025 fraud report, as covered by the collectibles and general press: over USD 200m in counterfeits intercepted, submissions up 45.3% year on year, Pokémon up 125%, and counterfeit rates of roughly 92% and 62% on two landmark vintage cards. Sports Illustrated
  7. Grading label fraud, criminal case. United States federal conviction for selling cards with falsified grades, produced by cleaning genuine grading labels and reprinting them with false grades and serial numbers. Intended loss in excess of USD 2m. Reported coverage
  8. Tamper-evident cases. PSA, PSA Security: A Buyer's Guide, in which the grading service documents counterfeiting of and tampering with its own holders, and notes that its cases are tamper-evident rather than tamper-proof. psacard.com
  9. Falsified medicines. World Health Organization, Substandard and falsified medical products: one in ten medical products in low- and middle-income countries. UNODC (2023): 267,000 annual deaths from falsified antimalarials and 169,000 from falsified antibiotics for childhood pneumonia in sub-Saharan Africa. who.int
  10. Counterfeit watches, the object itself. Bezel authentication team, reporting counterfeits built on genuine Swiss ébauche movements and a 29% rejection rate on submitted listings; Havocscope estimate of roughly 40 million counterfeit watches sold annually; trade reporting on CNC and 3D-printed "superfakes". Heddels · Corsearch
  11. Art forgery, the object itself. The Knoedler & Co. affair: around sixty canvases painted by Pei-Shen Qian in a Queens garage and sold as works by Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning and others; roughly $80m in sales between 1994 and 2008; the gallery closed in 2011. Forensic analysis identified one forged Rothko within about an hour once it was finally examined. CBS News · artnet
  12. Digital Product Passport and code cloning. Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (EU) 2024/1781; Battery Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, first binding passport deadline 18 February 2027. On the limits of printed carriers: research presented at the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, stating that a QR code by itself offers no protection against copying by cloning. European Commission · ACM DocEng
  13. AI-generated documents and deepfakes. Sumsub, cost and time to produce an AI-generated identity document. LexisNexis Risk Solutions (2026), one in one hundred identity check failures involving a deepfake, against a 180% year-on-year rise in attacks. Shufti, Identity Fraud Index 2026, projected growth in document deepfakes, annualised from five months of data and labelled by its authors as an estimate. LexisNexis · Sumsub · Shufti

Links open the publisher's page. Figures are quoted as published; where a source has since updated a number, the publisher's page takes precedence over this summary.

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