A copied tool breaks in someone’s hand.

Consumables and spare parts far more than complete machines. Cutting attachments, chains, blades, filters, nozzles and battery packs are copied because they are bought repeatedly, they are cheap to imitate visually, and buyers are used to sourcing them from whoever has stock. That is also where the safety exposure is highest, because those are the components that carry the load. A counterfeit housing is a commercial problem; a counterfeit chain running at speed is a physical one.

authentic.network gives every tool and spare part a copy-evident code with its own serial number. Dealers and users check it with a smartphone, no app, about a second; offline with the authentic app; a copy fails. The same serial number carries warranty – one claim per unit. BOSCH, STIHL and Chillington use authentic.network.

No. CE marking is a declaration by the manufacturer that the product conforms to applicable EU requirements. For most tool categories it is self-declared rather than issued by an outside body, which means the mark itself is only as reliable as the company applying it. A counterfeiter prints a CE mark as easily as a brand name, and buyers cannot tell the difference by looking. This is the gap a copy-evident mark closes: it does not assert that the product conforms, it establishes that the product is the one your declaration of conformity actually covers.

Yes. Each mark carries a serial number that can be linked to article number, batch, production date and intended market. For spare parts this matters more than for machines, because the part is what fails and the part is what gets replaced. A serial on the part means warranty, service history and grey-market checks attach to the component rather than to the machine it happened to be fitted to.

It gives the warranty a fixed point. Warranty can be granted against a verified serial number rather than against a receipt, and each serial can only be claimed once. A copy fails the check before a claim is opened, so it never enters the process. A unit that has already had its warranty claimed cannot be claimed again. The warranty process itself can be integrated directly into the authentic.network solution, so it does not need a separate tool alongside it.

No. The check runs in the phone camera and opens a page - there is no app to download and no account to create. This is not a convenience detail for tools: the person best placed to catch a counterfeit chain is the person about to fit it, and they will only do it if it costs them seconds. With the authentic app, verification also works offline, which matters on sites and in yards where coverage is poor.

Yes, from the checks themselves. Every verification scan records where and when it happened, including the ones that fail. Failed checks clustering in a region, around a distributor or on one article tell you where copies are circulating, and genuine units checked outside their intended market tell you where your own stock is being diverted. The dashboard shows where a check happened, how often and whether it raised a case; it does not attribute a scan to a particular role or station.