Museums are places to enjoy real, rare and precious items, but there is one museum that showcases fake items instead. With more than a thousand of fake items displayed next to their genuine counterparts, the Tilleke & Gibbins Museum of Counterfeit Goods reveals how easily you can be fooled into thinking some fake items that are widely sold across Thailand and Southeast Asia are the real thing.
Counterfeits are listed under 14 categories, including clothing, watches and eyewear, drugs, food, cosmetics and perfumes, mobile phones and accessories, automotive parts, and even motorcycles. Some of the fake items here look so similar to the genuine article; it is hard to distinguish even when they are compared side-by-side.
The museum is just a single room, but there were so many fake goods on display that the first thing that came to my mind while stepping inside was: “Do I have any fake goods with me?” One of the museum’s walls is dedicated to clothing items, where hundreds of famous brand-name shirts are on exhibit.
“There are quite a lot of counterfeit shirts and other clothing items. Seizures of these kinds of products are made every day,” Parichart Monaiyakul, attorney-at-law at the Bangkok office of Tilleke & Gibbins said.
This museum was established in 1989 by Tilleke & Gibbins, a law firm that handles many intellectual property cases. The firm created the museum with the aim of educating people about the problem of counterfeit goods and intellectual property violation. The items showcased in the museum represent just a tiny percentage of all the seized counterfeit goods.
Customers can identify counterfeit goods based on their quality, the place where they are being sold, as well as the price and the packaging. While genuine products are generally well-packaged, fakes are not. So, if you find it at a street stall on the footpath without packaging, you can be quite sure that it is a fake. Many think fakes goods meant the fake clothing and accessories easily found along Sukhumvit Road and Silom Road. But after visiting the museum, they become more aware about fake goods. The museum also displays fake drugs, powdered milk, shampoos, automotive parts, tools, books, toys and more.
One of the most difficult counterfeit items to spot is a mobile phone battery. The fake battery displayed in the museum is quite similar to the genuine one. But if you plan on buying a cheap battery for your mobile phone, be extra careful. Fake ones have been known to explode, since they are so poorly made and are not fused properly, causing them to overheat quite easily.
There are many other fake goods you should think twice before buying, such as automotive parts. The museum displays several such fakes, ranging from ignition wires and spark plugs to various motorcycle parts.
Fake goods may be cheap compared to the costly genuine ones, but it’s better to save money to get the genuine or buy a cheaper brand. Buying new products that are genuine encourages innovation, as producers will invest more in creating new and better products. On the other hand, if you buy fake goods, this creation will not happen.
