According to experts, the prevalance of counterfeit merchandise with faked holograms has tripled in the past three years, as the technology is propagated widely.

"The hardest part is peeling the original off," said Jeff Allen, a pioneer of holography. "You can duplicate a hologram, and the duplicate becomes a master you can use for production."

Courtney Martin, investigations coordinator for Trademark Management, believes that fake holograms are everywhere. His company works on behalf of US sports teams that charge up to US$250 for an item of merchandise and rely on holograms to authenticate the genuine article.

"For a trained eye, it used to be easier to tell a fake, but the counterfeits are getting so much better," Martin said.

The US Secret Service regularly encounters fake holograms in the course of their duties. This is due to the tide of counterfeit merchandise coming from China, Korea, India and Russia. But enforcement is rare.

"The Russian mob is a very, very entrepreneurial group," said Mitch Dembin, a former security advisor for Microsoft. "It's tough to enforce US law against counterfeiting overseas, especially in countries where there's not much enthusiasm for intellectual property rights."

Jeff Allen claims that he has always had little faith in holograms as a security measure in the first place.

"People put a lot of comfort and faith in it, but it's really the emperor's new clothes," he says. "They are dual purpose, for display and for security, and people forget the display end of it."

The most efficient way of counterfeiting holograms, mechanical copying, costs a mere $2,500 to produce essentially perfect copies. The profit margins make that feasible.

For example, a counterfeited bottle of whisky costs about £1, and an inexpensive hologram makes it look like the genuine article priced at £12.

"Shiny does not a hologram make," Courtney Martin warned.

"The covert features aren't detectable by the human eye, so unless people are carrying equipment when they buy...they have to trust their eyes."