Ferrari is one in all the world’s most recognisable and prestigious brands, and that has left it open to opportunistic scammers trying to improve the worth of their wares by pasting on the Prancing Horse logo.
The Italian carmaker has now detailed the extent of the issue, announcing the sheer scale of counterfeit items it successfully had seized and destroyed in 2023.
Perhaps in a mirrored image of the long-running joke that Ferrari makes more from merchandise than cars, almost the entire circa-400,000 counterfeit items destroyed last 12 months were clothing items, resembling shirts, belts, watches and shoes.
A complete of three vehicles, nevertheless, were discovered and later crushed. There has long been a cottage industry of making Ferrari lookalikes from cheaper two-seat sports cars resembling the Toyota MR2 and Pontiac Fiero.
One such automotive that was ordered to be crushed right into a cube had been made to resemble a Ferrari 360, though it’s hard to inform what it originally was.
The Maranello marque doesn’t count one other seven vehicles used for the filming of Michael Mann’s Ferrari film in its total, because the cars were built with permission on the condition that they might be destroyed when production wrapped up.
“The counterfeiters have gotten ever more capable,” Ferrari’s general legal counsel Carlo Daneo told Ferrari’s official magazine.
“There are those that use real Ferrari chassis to construct over it the body of a model of greater value. Some vehicles are realised so well that they find yourself going to auction and it’s our task to report them to the auction houses so that they’re taken off the market.
“And our objective is all the time the identical: it just isn’t all the time enough to take them off the market, we would like all of the fakes to be destroyed. And to realize that final result we try wherever possible to search out an agreement with the counterpart, in order to not must resort to initiating a legal case.”
Ferrari also warns those that own “independently modified vehicles” face consequences from the brand, resembling being excluded from official events and the removal of certain unspecified guarantees.
The announcement comes after Ferrari established the Anti-Counterfeiting Reward Project last 12 months, which inspires members of the general public to report any fake Ferrari merchandise or vehicles, with the offer of a present from the brand in return.
This Article First Appeared At www.carexpert.com.au
