Entrupy is not dependable!
- Thread starter BeenBurned
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Depending how you paid, can you contact your credit card company with the authentication you paid for?
Another example of an Entrupy mistake with a Coach authentication
forum.purseblog.com
Not only is the serial number on the best-known Coach fake serial numbers list, but whichever of Entrupy's "authenticators" looked at this one had better invest in a dictionary. Unless "SCRTCHES" is now accepted English usage.
Authenticate This COACH - **see first post for format**
IMPORTANT READ-ME Please post authenticity questions related to COACH in this thread. No PMs please. For further information, please refer to the first post on page 1 of this thread. Please follow the following requests: Before you submit a request for authentication, please search this...
forum.purseblog.com
Not only is the serial number on the best-known Coach fake serial numbers list, but whichever of Entrupy's "authenticators" looked at this one had better invest in a dictionary. Unless "SCRTCHES" is now accepted English usage.
Another example of an Entrupy mistake with a Coach authentication
Authenticate This COACH - **see first post for format**
IMPORTANT READ-ME Please post authenticity questions related to COACH in this thread. No PMs please. For further information, please refer to the first post on page 1 of this thread. Please follow the following requests: Before you submit a request for authentication, please search this...
Not only is the serial number on the best-known Coach fake serial numbers list, but whichever of Entrupy's "authenticators" looked at this one had better invest in a dictionary. Unless "SCRTCHES" is now accepted English usage.
LOL at "SCRTCHES"
AI Is a New Weapon in the Battle Against Counterfeits
Algorithms that can spot features invisible to the human eye are helping to protect retailers and shoppers from a glut of fake goods.
www.wsj.com
When Olivia Matthaei, a consignment store sales clerk, needs to check whether a designer handbag is authentic, she knows the drill. She grabs a custom camera with a microscope lens provided by Entrupy, a New York-based artificial-intelligence startup. The shape of a bulky battery pack, it pops onto an iPhone or iPod. She opens the Entrupy app and selects a brand from a list.
The app guides her through taking photos of different parts of the bag, such as specific areas of the fabric and logo, as she presses the camera against the material. 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.
While developing the algorithms behind their tech, Entrupy’s founders spent years collecting authentic and fake bags to teach the algorithm how to tell the difference between the two, down to details that most humans would have a hard time spotting. Entrupy still has stacks of fancy handbags, most of them fakes, surrounding their engineers’ workstations at its Manhattan office, which has been closed since March because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Entrupy’s camera fits onto a phone and magnifies the fabric of a bag, making features invisible to the eye become clear in the resulting images.
PHOTO: JESSICA PETTWAY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The lens on Entrupy’s camera magnifies the fabric at least 100 times, making features in the material that are invisible to the eye become clear in the resulting images. Depending on the bag, the AI will check 500 to 1,500 features, such as color, stitching and the pattern of pores in leather. A result pops up in the app in anywhere from 60 seconds to an hour, depending on the brand. With each use, the algorithm becomes a little smarter.
“This is an ideal case for AI,” says Anima Anandkumar, a computer-science professor at California Institute of Technology and director of machine-learning research at chip maker NvidiaCorp. who wasn’t involved in the development of Entrupy’s app.
Machine learning works by viewing hundreds or thousands of examples, in this case both real and fake bags, and learning to spot what delineates the two.
The technology is already used in manufacturing to find defects and could be used in a similar way to find counterfeits, says Ms. Anandkumar. Unlike humans, it is able to examine thousands of examples of properly made products and consider billions of data points to find problems, she says.
Today, the process is expensive and time-consuming, not least because it involves collecting real and fake items. In the future, researchers could use AI techniques—such as generative adversarial networks, which create realistic images, or transfer learning, where a model trained to detect one item could train a new model to detect similar items—to speed up the process and bring costs down, says Ms. Anandkumar.
Eventually, the technology could be adapted to other products. Vidyuth Srinivasan, Entrupy’s co-founder and chief executive, wants to expand into verifying industrial goods, electronics, food, medicine and more.
There is a lot to catch. The counterfeit market is worth over $500 billion and makes up around 3.3% of world trade, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Vidyuth Srinivasan, Entrupy’s co-founder and chief executive, at the startup’s office in New York.
PHOTO: JESSICA PETTWAY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Mr. Srinivasan, Ashlesh Sharma and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian started Entrupy in 2012, and spent the next four years collecting data. Entrupy employees bought and returned so many bags that they ended up being blacklisted by some stores, says Mr. Srinivasan. For counterfeits, they would go to China and come back with suitcases full of imitations.
Today, Entrupy’s app can check 15 designer brands, from Gucci to Chanel. Prices start at $99 a month for up to five checks monthly and go up to tens of thousands of dollars for annual subscriptions that cover hundreds of tests. Entrupy says it has sold about 900 of its cameras to customers in 65 countries, including Dubai’s department of economic development, eBayInc. and Goodwill Industries International Inc.
Stores pay the fees to protect their reputations with customers and avoid the costs of acquiring counterfeits. In some cases, they can charge more for bags that are authenticated. Forgeries have outsmarted Entrupy’s algorithms about 0.01% of the time, Mr. Srinivasan says. If a customer buys a bag that later turns out to be counterfeit, and the app missed it, the company says it will buy it for the same purchase price.
Gucci and Chanel didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Launched in 2015, the online sneaker marketplace GOAT uses machine learning to pinpoint counterfeits among the million or so listings that are up at any given time, says CEO Eddy Lu.
Once sellers accept a buyer’s bid for a pair of shoes, they ship them to one of eight GOAT centers around the world. There, AI scans for microscopic deviations in the item, assisting human authenticators who feel, weigh and even smell the shoes. “The glue that Nike uses is different than what other factories use,” Mr. Lu says.
Eddy Lu, the chief executive of online sneaker marketplace GOAT, at a conference in June 2019. The company uses AI and humans to uncover counterfeit shoes.
PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS
If the shoes are real, they are sent to the buyer. GOAT offers to send back or destroy shoes that didn’t pass its tests. AI speeds up the process, but it is impossible to train algorithms to keep up with new shoe styles that debut every week, Mr. Lu says. Eventually each new sneaker gets the AI treatment, but even then, Mr. Lu says, there is no current AI that can replicate all the different checks that the human authenticators look for.
Counterfeit goods also show up on Amazon, where more than half of physical merchandise sales in 2019 were from third-party sellers, according to the company.
Last year, Amazon released Project Zero, an AI-driven anticounterfeiting program for brands that aims to automatically remove bogus goods from the site. Brands provide Amazon with logos, trademarks and other data, which the AI uses to look for suspected counterfeits among the billions of product listings.
“Amazon strictly prohibits the sale of counterfeit products, and we invest heavily in both funds and company energy to ensure our policy is followed,” Amazon spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said in a statement.
Other online marketplaces have anticounterfeiting measures in place. Shopgoodwill.com, a website set up in 1999 to let Goodwill stores in the U.S. and Canada sell their most lucrative donations online, includes Entrupy certificates with each handbag. The scans let 80 Goodwill locations that use the site list handbags for more money, says Ryan Smith, the senior technology services director at Goodwill of Orange County, which runs the website.
At Opulent Habits, New Jersey’s shutdown order has changed business—the shop now sells its goods curbside. Owner Darcy Ginsberg scans about 60 bags a month and finds a fake about once every four months. That number is lower now that counterfeiters know she is using Entrupy, she says. In 2019, 9.6% of Entrupy scans were fakes, down from 15% in 2017, according to company data.
“It’s a huge confidence booster for customers,” Ms. Ginsberg says. “It puts them at ease.”
^^^ That article is nonsense because although it's current, Entrupy still hasn't updated its algorithms and is still making mistakes.
The way AI is supposed to work is that when they make mistakes, they're supposed to update their data to fix the errors and account for anomalies. As shown by @Hyacinth's post above (as recently as Jun 24, 2020), Entrupy was still deeming Coach fakes as genuine. (And these are NOT close fakes. None of the mistakes we've seen on Coach are excusable nor can they be attributed to being close.)
Many of the fakes we've seen on the Coach subforum are from Goodwill, Salvation Army and from resellers who bought from Goodwill.
For the prices that customers are paying at Opulent Habits and some of the other luxury resellers, they'd darned well better make sure that Entrupy got it right.
The way AI is supposed to work is that when they make mistakes, they're supposed to update their data to fix the errors and account for anomalies. As shown by @Hyacinth's post above (as recently as Jun 24, 2020), Entrupy was still deeming Coach fakes as genuine. (And these are NOT close fakes. None of the mistakes we've seen on Coach are excusable nor can they be attributed to being close.)
Many of the fakes we've seen on the Coach subforum are from Goodwill, Salvation Army and from resellers who bought from Goodwill.
For the prices that customers are paying at Opulent Habits and some of the other luxury resellers, they'd darned well better make sure that Entrupy got it right.
It doesn't make sense that they were buying up counterfeits. They should only need authentic examples, then if something doesn't match the authentic examples, it can be deemed fake. If something matches a counterfeit, it doesn't mean it is counterfeit - it could mean the counterfeit matches the authentic item in that respect.
I've been following their progress over the years but TBH not holding much faith in their AI or processes. it's a classic case of a business facing an industry wide problem so let's throw some Silicon Valley dudes who know how to code into it and they should be able to lick it in no time, and yeah get money from various VC dudes while they're at it. the article mentions that they've only built up about 15 brands in 5 years or something? as we all know, it takes a lot more than just coding prowess to address the issues. their lack of understanding, I mean a genuine understanding, of the highly proprietary ecosystem of brand names, super fakes, bad fakes and everything in between, is holding back any real progress. their AI shortcoming is thinking that it's a problem with binary answers (yes or no) and clearly it's multifaceted with decision trees looking more like a Monte Carlo simulation (aka deeply complex). I doubt if they would ever have the cooperation of the brand themselves, so they will always lack first hand knowledge and expertise which is critical to building a successful AI algorithm.
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The trained eye is much better. Someone who can decipher the stitch, the texture of the leather, weight, even scent, etc. AI Authentication can never replace the expertise and history of dealing with authentic luxury bags as accomplished by avid collectors and trained authenticators. This is such an intriguing topic!
AI can be effective, to wit AI is reviewing millions of radiology scans to learn and detect cancers. but it always goes back the the foundation, the input has to be good to obtain good output, like the popular saying "crap in crap out". Entrupy is just fumbling along, they buy some fake and genuine items, and make some comparisons and then proclaim a verdict. did they ever hang out on the authentication threads on TPF? they could learn a thing or two. it doesn't bode well that it's programmers running the platform, not bag aficionados with a vested interest and passion for purses. authentication isn't rocket science per se but it's highly detailed and can be mastered.
In Coach, we don't count stitches per inch or most of the things that entrupy seems to focus on. We focus a lot on fonts, lengths of dashes, sizes of certain letters in comparison to others, as well as specific wording compared to the era of the bag - all things that entrupy seems to ignore.
And what REALLY p1$$es us off is when things as simple as a serial number that's been exposed as fake on dozens of internet sites, or a style number that doesn't come close to matching the style of the bag, are declared genuine by Entrupy. Their brilliant computer algorithms can't seem to be able to handle something as basic as a known fake serial number. So what good are they? Maybe they ought to try PAYING some low-grade employee WITHOUT zeros and ones for brain cells to actually do a little fecking RESEARCH.
How that company keeps pulling the wool over the Medias' eyes with their infallible algorithms and their "expensive and time-consuming" process never ceases to amaze me. See my Post # 48 earlier in this thread.
About a year or so ago, 60 minutes had a show on aritificial intelligence. The AI specialist explained how (their particular) system worked whereby they found or were notified of errors and fed all that new information into their system to weed out what is not authentic. Every time a mistake was found, it was fixed.
IMO, it doesn't look like Entrupy tries to correct mistakes. Whether buyers of fakes don't file claims, whether recipients of fakes trust that Entrupy doesn't err, whether Goodwill or other sellers whose items were "authenticated" but returned as fake lets Entrupy know they erred or whether Entrupy just doesn't GAS, I don't know.
What I do know is that we've seen way too many similar mistakes in which no attempt appears to have been made to fix those inaccurate authentications.
Recently we performed an inhouse (personal inspection) on a bag and we deemed it fake. We learned later that the same serial number was found on bags being sold on eBay with Entrupy certificates of authenticity. @Michele or @ironic568 can post more information about these bags.
I'll just post the pictures of the stickers, maybe @Michele and @ironic568 can post the details. The last picture is from the Fake bag we authenticated by personal inspection which came with a certificate from a competing authentication service. The link is for a bag with the same serial number from a different seller and with the Entrupy certificate.
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