The counterfeiters' most profitable product

Today I went to a conference on the dangers of counterfeit ink.
Printer firms are apparently reluctant to highlight the growing problem of counterfeited printer ink, which is cheap and profitable, for fear customers will use almost as expensive brand name alternative suppliers. As everyone knows, printer firms recoup the fact that they often sell the printer units at a loss by selling cartridges of ink expensively. Use has grown since the advent of digital cameras.
And therefore it is not perhaps surprising that counterfeiting too has grown fivefiold since 2001.
Perhaps 5% of ink is counterfeited, a figure that rises to half in Mexico. The advice is to avoid funny packaging, low prices, beware of ink that runs dry quickly - one way for the firms to make profits is not to fill up the cartridges to the top.
The consequences can be dire.
Here is an example. A firm called Multi Tech in the US sold cartridges at prices too good to be true via ebay in the US. Customers who initially thought they had a great deal, were soon in shock: there were illegible printouts, clogged inkjet printers that took hours to clean, or the printers just broke and had to be sold for scrap.
One person called Terry Schumacher from Mesa, Arizona, bought eight cartridges for his Stylus Epson 1280 for $150 but soon found it was a bad bargain: while packaging was a flawless copy, the ink started spitting everywherer when he tried to start making copies. Another person, a Gigi Diacomo from Minnesota, found that false ink ruined the printhead of her Epson 825 printer. They gave up after a few hours trying to repair the printer. And yet the deal had seemed so good: a third below normal price for a number of cartridges whioh were sealed and had holograms. So what to do?
Call the commission of course, which has promised to launch one of those white papers that may or may not end up as legislation.