Mulberry Bags: Police Destroy £750,000 worth
ONE little story about the police destroying £750,000’s worth of fake Mulberry bags. The problem with this story being that if they were real ones then they wouldn’t have been destroyed but beause they were fake ones they’re not worth £750,000.
Dealers attempted to smuggle more than 1,000 fake designer handbags worth more than £750,000 through Manchester Airport.
The fake Mulberry handbags were discovered by Border Force officers in a crackdown on counterfeit goods that arrived from Hong Kong.
In total, 1,100 bags worth £752,000 were seized by the officers on July 18. All the bags have now been destroyed.
This is a standard problem in descriptions of fakes, counterfeits and the rip offs of various electronic goods. Even with illegal drugs: they always value the stuff they’ve confiscated at the full price of whatever it is. And that’s just not right: precisely because they are fake, or digital copies, or illegal drugs in bulk, then they’re not actually worth the full price of the real goods.
Say that Microsoft Windows costs £200. And I copy it and stick it on a friend’s computer. That would be recorded as a £200 loss to Microsoft. But it’s obviously not: because we wouldn’t have paid £200 for a real copy, we would have gone off and found some other solution if we had had to pay that much. When the coppers find a truck full of heroin in Amsterdam, say, they tell us the value of it as if it were in 1 gramme baggies on the streets of London. But it’s obviously not worth that precisely because it’s not in 1 gramme baggies in London it’s 1 tonne in a truck in Amsterdam. And real Mulberry bags, in a real Mulberry store, might be worth £750 each but fakes at the airport, before customs, simply are not worth that amount.
The real lesson of this is never, never, believe the cash numbers you are given for the value of any illegal activity.
Posted: 12th, September 2014 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
