Just took up modeling after retirement. Previously at work I had experience in investigating counterfeit products in the Oil and Gas industry. A very dangerous fraud which could lead to loss of life and massive loss of money.
Counterfeit models obviously is not in the same league but I am curious to know if it is problem in the industry.
Can anyone point me to articles on counterfeiting in the modeling industry ?
Thanks.

I don't know of any articles but I know some counterfeiters

Any of them into money? LOL

in the figurine market you can find especially on ebay a lot of counterfeit also others After Market for AFV,etc... ,usually the copy is made with resin some good molds some others pretty bad

Alpine figures and other brands are regularly pirated on ebay and other sites.

CMK, considered a legitimate company, pirated many Alpine figures and switched arms and legs around, etc. to make new figures. They never responded to Alpine's inquiries.

Academy's armour line was started by poorly cloning Tamiya kits such as the Panzer IV, MUTT, Sgt York, etc.

Recasters can be found on eBay or sites like Aliexpress.

As for straight up counterfeiting of mass production injection molded kits, not so much. Ie: fake DML box with crappy short run sprues inside.

Also on Aliexpress you find a lots of Alpine,Stalingrad,Pegaso,Young and others figurines copy

Is it illegal to take parts from kits, modify them, produce copies from the modified parts and sell them?

SpaceXhydro. So long as the modified copies are not sold as being originals from another company then it would not be illegal.
If a company makes direct copies of a non-patented product and sells them under their own company brand name that is also not illegal.

I do know that Evolution Miniatures, Andrea and others have all suffered from the re-casters. Often sold on eBay as -without box etc, they are always much cheaper and often inferior in quality.

Figure manufacturers are often hardest hit as many are one man operations with tight profit margins. The re-casters simply sell badly copied figures and if caught change trading name and move on. I've reported a few sellers on eBay.

Well done Brian. I think we should all do the same to support good manufactures.
Anyone found the main kits to be counterfeit ?

Years ago Trumpeter recast the Tamiya T-72M1 even photocopying the original instructions. It was a horrible kit. Now they seem to be a dominate force in the industry. A case of "piracy pays".

Many years ago before Hobbyboss existed, I bought an AAVP7 from another Chinese brand called WSH or something. It was a badly cloned tamiya and had the EAAK from (I suspect)Kirin which was the main reason I bought it. Came with a motor that drove the propellers so you could sail it in the park on a Sunday afternoon. Batteries not included.

Thanks for the replies.
Reason I ask (I'm new to modeling) is because I just bought an Italeri kit. Started putting it together. Detail is OK but the fit up is not as good as other Italeri kits I have made.
So I looked closer at the box. It does not say "Figure not included" like the other Italeri kits.(There is no pilot figure in the box) The colour of the box art work is different than the original Italeri boxes. (Asked Italeri about that but they miss-understood my question but they did send a copy of their original box which is in different colour.)
Small detail differences but made me think of counterfeiting,so I was wondering how rife counterfeiting model kits is. Need to be more careful when buying I suppose.
Best regards.

It is without doubt the resin figure makers that suffer the most from this activity, and it is also doubly destructive to their trade. Firstly the act of copying their work and selling them at a cheap price reduces their sales, this means they have to charge more for each figure to make it worthwhile. The second issue is that copies are never as good as the originals; this is usually true of both detail and size as copies are progressively smaller. The result of this is that potential customers don’t purchase as they have been disappointed in previous purchases unaware that they were copies.