rkb:
I strongly urge you to check out my friend Hitha Prabhakar’s new book Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Global Terrorists. It’s extremely well-researched and thought-provoking. It’s an obviously timely topic as something about knockoff items is in the news almost every day (and I’m not even a huge reader of fashion news) and it’s truly eye-opening.
Organized retail crime is now a $38 billion business.
Synchronized global teams are pilfering immense volumes of high-value products, counterfeiting even more—and using the profits to support the world’s most vicious terrorists and criminal gangs. In this eye-opening exposé, business journalist Hitha Prabhakar connects the dots and follows the money deep into the world’s fastest growing criminal industry. You’ll learn how the Internet, social media, and disposable cell phones have opened the floodgates for a new generation of criminals—and how their multimillion-dollar ripoffs are funding everyone from Al-Qaeda to Central America’s drug lords.
Black Market Billions draws on extensive first person interviews with law enforcement, industry personnel, and the criminals themselves. Prabhakar goes “inside” to reveal why the piracy economy has exploded…why preventative measures have failed…and what to expect next, as organized retail crime reaches a terrifying critical mass.