Polymer scientists, engineers and physicists have been pressed into service in the battle against credit card, cash and branded clothing counterfeiters. The EU is funding a new £400,000 project that will use advanced technology to develop anti-counterfeiting systems that cannot readily be cracked or duplicated.
The project is being headed by Materials Ireland Polymer Research Centre, a Programme for Advanced Technology unit based at Trinity College. The funding comes through the EU's CRAFT programme which promotes co-operation between European companies and universities on a technological level.
Paper currency anti-counterfeiting measures included the use of watermarks, metal strips and microprinting, but high quality colour photocopying systems had helped to overcome some of these, explained the scientist heading up the project, Dr Robert Howard, a research officer in Materials Ireland. Counterfeiters have also found ways to beat measures for credit cards including cracking codes and unscrambling information imbedded on the cards' magnetic strips. Card fraud in Britain runs to an estimated £100 million each year, he said.
Germany and the US were using new fluorescent dyes included in the note printing process and this had made things more difficult but counterfeiters had been able to duplicate these, Dr Howard said. The same approach on credit cards was also duplicated.
The Materials Ireland team is bringing a new level of complexity into the use of fluorescent chemicals, however, by developing complex polymer dyes that cannot easily be copied and which fluoresce in a very specific way. "What we aim to do is synthesize more complicated dyes," he said.
Fluorescence is the phenomenon which makes clothing "glow" under ultraviolet light. This occurs when the UV light is absorbed by the detergent in the cloth and emitted at a lower energy, usually blue light in the case of detergents. Dr Andy Davey, a Trinity polymer scientist working in partnership with Materials Ireland, developed a dye which emits blue light, "not just blue but a specific wavelength of blue", Dr Howard said.
"The heart of the technology would be in the polymer. The polymer would have distinctive characteristics that would make it difficult to break by the counterfeiters," he said. "Even if it was cracked, you just change the polymer which would shift its spectral properties."
Duplicating such a complex chemical substance would not be easy. It was also a very efficient fluorescing substance and so only small quantities of the dye would be required to mark a note or a credit card, he said. This made things more difficult for the counterfeiter, even one with a chemistry degree, because only small quantities of the material would be available for detailed analysis.
The project includes the participation of the Polymer Development Centre in Athlone, Horcom, a TCD campus company, Nelipak, a Galway-based plastic moulding company and Vinifer, a security marking company based in Belfast. There are also two German partners who are responsible for developing a cheap, compact device that would read the light spectrum emitted by the dye.
The expected approach, Dr Howard said, would involve applying the dye to a "reading point". The reading device would measure the resultant spectrum to confirm authenticity. The technology could be applied to notes and cards and also to a range of expensive consumer goods such as branded clothing, CDs, car components, mobile phones and video tapes, Dr Howard said.
The dye would have to be stable, retaining its fluorescent response despite exposure to strong light, temperature changes and constant wear. If applied as an invisible marker on branded clothing it would also have to be washable. The reader would have to be cheap, simple to operate yet dependable and sensitive enough to read the tiny reading point. It would also have to be small enough to sit on a shop counter or be integrated into a credit card swipe device.
Materials Ireland was able to draw on scientific expertise available at Trinity to make the project work, Dr Howard said. "That is one of the benefits of being in the college." Horcom would help to develop the product but would also then commercialise the results of the study, he added.
Materials Ireland employs eight full-time researchers. "It was set up in 1972 as part of the PATs programme. The area we specialise in is plastics, polymers and adhesives," Dr Howard said.
