Detection of Fake Products Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

The manufacturing and marketing of counterfeit or duplicate products and goods leads to consequential financial, health and safety threat to end users. It also impacts on the economic growth of original manufacturers and businesses through revenue loss, product defamation, downtime, replacement expenses, forcing brands to spend money fighting counterfeits, trust among business partners can also be at risk, stealing sales etc. To overcome these crucial effects of counterfeiting, a blockchain based system is used in identification of original products and detects duplicate products to ensure the identification of original goods. In this work, with massive emerging trends in wireless technology, QR (Quick Response) codes and barcodes provides a robust technique to cut down the practice of counterfeiting the products. The fake products are detected using camera scanner, where QR or barcode of the product is linked to a block chain in order to store product details and guaranteed unique code of each product as blocks in the database. If the code matches, the notification will be sent to the customer indicating the authenticity of the product and else if it does not match, a notification will be sent to customer that product is fake or counterfeited as well as to manufacturer about the place of purchase if customer accepts the request made by the application. This approach ensures that consumers won’t completely rely on merchants to determine if products are original or forged.

Keywords—Blockchain, Smart contracts, QR code, anti- counterfeit.

I.             Introduction

The global development of the product always comes with risk factors such as counterfeiting and duplication which in turn can affect the company name, reputation, revenue and customer satisfaction. The trading and marketing of counterfeit products is growing in humongous. It affects the sales, reputation, and profits of the companies and also do poses a fatal threat for the unsuspecting buyers. In order to ensure the identification and traceability of false goods or products throughout the supply chain and to combat this phenomenon, a fully functional blockchain system is proposed. Companies only need to pay very low transaction fees and they no longer need to worry about the possibility of delivering counterfeit products to end-users. Because of counterfeit or fake products manufacturers face the biggest problems and huge losses in sense of brand damage as well as revenue loss. To find the originality of the product blockchain technology can be used. Blockchain is an arrangement of recorded information that makes it difficult or impossible to modify or hack the framework. Blockchain technology is a distributed, decentralized, and digital ledger that stores transaction information as blocks in databases which is connected with chains. Each block in the chain contains multiple transactions, and every time a new transaction occurs on the blockchain, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s record. The decentralized database managed by the number of participants is known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Blockchain is a type of DLT in which transactions are recorded with an immutable cryptographic signature called a hash. Blockchain technology helps to solve the problem of counterfeiting a product. Blockchain technology is more secure compared to other technology. Once the product is stored on the network hash code is generated for that product and it is possible to maintain all transaction records of the product and its current owner as a chain will be created for that product transactions. It will store all the transaction records as blocks in the blockchain. In the proposed system we are assigning a generated QR code or barcode to a particular product created by manufacturer along with all the details of the product and the end customer can scan that QR code to get all information about that product. After scanning the QR code or barcode the user can identify whether the product is real or fake.