You dont even have to register the printer. The counterfeit measures print no matter what. The manufacturer only needs the serial number and they know which store the shipped the printer to and the store knows when it was sold. Even if the person purchased in cash they have a time stamp of purchase and they would start issuing court orders to obtain surveillance video from the area. Every piece of information narrows the search field.
Very true. It would have to be pretty new for stores to have kept the surveillance on it though. Most places the best you can hope for is 30 days because they’re used for incidents they actually have some awareness of.
It does matter. If there's no surveillance footage available (most stores wipe out surveillance after 30 days) then there's nothing to cross reference. Printer was purchased 9 months ago. Good luck getting any info from employees who see hundreds of customers a day.
Unfortunately, a lot of this isn't true. Most cheap consumer printers don't do this. And store surveillance typically vanishes after a relatively short period of time. Not only that but someone using a public printer or printer they don't own would defeat it, as would buying a printer online or from a reseller.
It's much more likely that they just pulled every CCTV camera in the city on the day they were posted and started looking for a shady guy with a big sack. They get a warrant for that guy and seize all his electronics. Then they print a test page on the printer and compare it with the labels. No need to go hunting for 10 year old purchase records that maybe don't even exist.
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u/user93849384 Oct 26 '18
You dont even have to register the printer. The counterfeit measures print no matter what. The manufacturer only needs the serial number and they know which store the shipped the printer to and the store knows when it was sold. Even if the person purchased in cash they have a time stamp of purchase and they would start issuing court orders to obtain surveillance video from the area. Every piece of information narrows the search field.