Ferrari is one of the world’s most recognisable and prestigious brands, and that has left it open to opportunistic scammers looking to improve the value of their wares by pasting on the Prancing Horse logo.
The Italian carmaker has now detailed the extent of the problem, announcing the sheer scale of counterfeit items it successfully had seized and destroyed in 2023.
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Perhaps in a reflection of the long-running joke that Ferrari makes more from merchandise than cars, almost all of the circa-400,000 counterfeit items destroyed last year were clothing items such as shirts, belts, watches and shoes.
A total of three vehicles, however, were discovered and later crushed. There has long been a cottage industry of creating Ferrari lookalikes from cheaper two-seat sports cars such as the Toyota MR2 and Pontiac Fiero.
One such car that was ordered to be crushed into a cube had been made to resemble a Ferrari 360, though it’s hard to tell what it originally was.
The Maranello marque said it does not count another seven vehicles used for the filming of Michael Mann’s film Ferrari in its total, because the cars were built with permission on the condition they would be destroyed when production wrapped up.
“The counterfeiters are becoming ever more capable,” Ferrari’s general legal counsel Carlo Daneo told Ferrari’s official magazine.
“There are those who use real Ferrari chassis to construct over it the body of a model of greater value. Some vehicles are realised so well that they end up going to auction and it is our task to report them to the auction houses so that they are taken off the market.
“And our objective is always the same: it is not always enough to take them off the market, we want all the fakes to be destroyed. And to attain that end result we try wherever possible to find an agreement with the counterpart, so as not to have to resort to initiating a legal case.”
Ferrari also warns those who own “independently modified vehicles” face consequences from the brand, such as being excluded from official events and the removal of certain unspecified guarantees.
The announcement comes after Ferrari established the Anti-Counterfeiting Reward Project last year, which encourages members of the public to report any fake Ferrari merchandise or vehicles, with the offer of a gift from the brand in return.
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