"I'm going to show you a fake bag so you can see how spectacular an imitation can be." Lucía De La Calle, is an appraiser at the second-hand luxury handbags boutique Del Páramo Vintage in Valladolid, in northwest Spain. She shows EL PAÍS a Louis Vuitton Twist MM bag, a classic model that the brand wants to make a basic, betting on its reissue year after year in different colors. "I think my eye is quite trained but, often, even I am unable to perceive the difference," says De La Calle. The woman who bought this bag for €2,500 on the second-hand market brought it to the store with the brand's characteristic orange box and authentic dust cover, as well as a copy of the invoice from its previous owner.

Counterfeiting is a big business. Nearly $509 billion of fake and pirated products were sold internationally in 2016. In that year, the latest for which data was available, counterfeit goods made up 3.3% of international trade, up from 2.5% three years earlier, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That figure, which does not include domestic trade in fakes, not only means companies are losing revenue and consumers are not getting their money's worth; counterfeiting also helps fund organized crime. Because it skirts safety regulations, makers of counterfeits could use toxic materials or produce unsafe products.

It normally takes a user three to five minutes to go through the authentication process, but she is faster because the store, Opulent Habits, in Madison, N.J., has been using the app since 2018. "I can do it in less than a minute at this point," Ms. Matthaei says. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. Increasingly, the role of spotting counterfeits is being filled by artificial-intelligence algorithms that have studied every angle of tens of thousands of bags, shoes and other items that are often knocked off. Inc. are developing machine-learning tools to help protect shoppers.

This article is part of our collection about the 2019 state of IT. A CIO has always been busy running the IT and computer systems that support an enterprise. Now with artiificial intelligence (AI) turning every company into a data company, a CIO's job is more central and more complicated than ever before. A recent Gartner survey found that some of the world's biggest companies plan to double the number of AI projects within the next year, with four AI efforts already in place on average. Additionally, companies plan to spend more on AI, in the neighborhood of $77 billion in 2022, up more than 3x from the $24 billion spent in 2018, according to IDC.

Luxury handbags may exude the confidence of wealth, but take them with a grain of fancy salt -- the counterfeit business is booming. Around 2.5 percent of global imports to the US are counterfeit or pirated goods. This amounts to about half a trillion dollars' worth of merchandise, and these ill-gotten gains fund organized crime. According to Maysa Razavi, an attorney with the International Trademark Association, shoppers often don't know that "the same people who are counterfeiting are involved in human trafficking and terrorism." The next time you don a head-to-toe Gucci ensemble, keep in mind that the clutch you bought for a bargain could be lining the pockets of an underworld kingpin.

Entrupy is the only company using artificial intelligence to instantly authenticate luxury handbags and accessories. Our mission is to become the Verisign of physical goods to attack the $1.7 trillion sales of counterfeit goods globally. Our authentication process is based on microscopic material detection and advanced image recognition. Our solution is currently available to marketplaces and businesses that sell pre-owned handbags and accessories. A unique certificate is instantly created for every authentic item that can be shared and independently verified.

People have been falling for trickery and hoaxes since forever. Human history is filled with false prophets, demagogues, snake-oil peddlers, grifters and con men. The problem is that these days, any two-bit huckster with a conspiracy theory and a supplement brand can hop on YouTube and instantly reach a global audience. And while the definition of "facts" now depends on who you're talking to, one thing that most people agreed to prior to January 20th this year is the veracity of hard evidence. Video and audio recordings have long been considered reliable sources of evidence but that's changing thanks to recent advances in AI.

Nothing ruins a potential fashion coup quite like realizing all too late that you just spent this month's rent on something that's fake as shit. What customers and companies alike need is access to technology that could easily detect fakes, thus avoiding the anguish of a misleading purchase. Enter New York-based startup Entrupy, whose "on-demand authentication system" is getting some serious attention from Bloomberg and beyond. Entrupy's handheld microscope camera (used in tandem with a smartphone app) is capable of magnifying objects 260 times, meaning potentially naming features that the mere human eye might miss are made more visible. "Today everything is done by humans," Vidyuth Srinivasan told Bloomberg.

Sophisticated knock-offs can be difficult to spot, even for experts. It takes years of experience to see mistakes in the grain of the leather, or issues with the stitching - and even then there is a lot of guesswork involved. New York startup Entrupy believes it has developed technology that can solve those issues. Using a handheld microscope camera and computer vision software, the company claims its tech can spot fakes for 11 brands, including Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, with better than 98% accuracy. Second-hand clothes stores use specialist staff to detect counterfeits, but as Entrupy's co-founder Vidyuth Srinivasan told Bloomberg, "for businesses that are growing, that's not a scalable solution".

Criminals have it rough these days. Modern technology has made it impossible to get away with anything, from shoplift-deterrent sensors to ever-cheaper security cameras to social media footprints chipping away at anonymity. Now even the global $900 billion shadow economy behind counterfeiting luxury goods is in danger: AI startup Entrupy is the first company to try curbing the trafficking of counterfeits (and restore trust to resale markets in the process) using artificial intelligence. Vidyuth Srinivasan, CEO and cofounder of Entrupy, spoke with me about this fascinating industry, how a cross-country motorbike ride proves the importance of stopping counterfeits, and the biggest challenge they've overcome so far. When I started Entrupy alongside my cofounders Ashlesh Sharma and Lakshmi Subramanian, we set ourselves a goal of building a scalable and versatile technology solution to combat the second oldest problem of humanity, counterfeit goods.