One identity.
Two functions.
The passport says what the product is. Authentication says whether this is really it.
The answer is different every time.
Copying what a chip said last time gets you nothing.
A real label on a refilled bottle.
The most common counterfeit is not a fake tag. It is a genuine one, reused.
Sealed
The tag's circuit runs through the closure. Intact means the product has not been opened since it left the line.
Opened
Breaking the seal changes what the chip reports — permanently. It cannot be set back, including by us.
Recorded
First observed opening is stored against the unit, so a later buyer sees the state even if the packaging looks perfect.
An opened genuine product is shown as genuine and opened — not as a counterfeit. Overstating that would train people to ignore the warning.
Every scan is evidence.
A verification is also a data point: when, roughly where, how often, on which batch. Patterns that no physical feature can reveal become visible — stock sold outside its channel, a code appearing in two provinces the same week, one unit scanned hundreds of times.
Alerts reach your team. What the consumer sees is deliberately more conservative: a brand cannot afford a genuine product being called fake, so borderline signals are recorded for you without being shouted at the customer.
Which carriers support this →Banknotes are the proof.
Currency carries the most sophisticated physical security ever deployed — special paper, watermarks, threads, colour-shifting inks, microtext — backed by centuries of national investment. Counterfeit notes still circulate widely.
Not because the craft was beaten, but because a cashier glances and moves on. Physical security depends on the ability and willingness of whoever is checking.
So the industry measures the wrong thing. The question is not how hard a feature is to copy. It is how many people actually verified — and that only goes up when verifying costs one second.
Where this is weaker.
You will hear these from any competent buyer, so here they are first.
It needs a network
Verification happens server-side. A hologram works in a basement; this does not. Offline verification is on our roadmap for exactly this reason.
Not every phone taps
NFC is widespread but not universal. A printed code with an activation step covers the rest, at lower assurance — stated as such.
It costs more
An order of magnitude more than printed security. It earns that on products where a single counterfeit costs more than the whole tagging programme.