Police the marketplace for a client's products

The Mintz Group has substantial experience in cases involving counterfeit and gray-market products. We have traced products to hidden sources in industries as diverse as apparel, pharmaceuticals, entertainment and machine parts. We are often assigned to police the gray market for a clients' diverted products that have turned up in unauthorized hands.

In one case, we worked for a company that suspected it had bought the rights to a product whose sales had been fraudulently inflated to boost the purchase price. The suspicion was that the seller had inflated the numbers in the most recent quarter by “channel-stuffing” to one or more gray-market middlemen who would hold products and later resell them to actual customers.

We identified a particular gray marketer who had been peddling huge quantities of the product just after our client bought the rights to it. And we found a source who kept the gray marketer's past catalogues, which we used as evidence of the seller's scheme.