Kristall Vodka SMS Verification Service

Staska  By on 13 Sep 07

Everyone knows that Russians love their Vodka. Little less known fact is that there’s a huge counterfeit Vodka industry in Russia.

Shipments of bootlegged bottles of Vodka, disguised as premium brands can make their way almost into any store. So when you buy a bottle, you often can not be sure that you are getting the real Vodka and not some toxic surrogate. Last year 40 000 people died in Russia from toxic alcohol surrogates.

Now one of Russian Vodka makers – Kristall – is taking the fight against counterfeit into it’s own hands. With the help of mobile phones and SMS service.

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Yesterday Kristall has officially announced Kristall Vodka SMS verification service. The new bottles of Kristall Vodka will be manufactured with special sticker on the cap of the bottle, containing numeric code. Every bottle has a unique identification number and the sticker is damaged when the cap is opened, so it cannot be used twice.

After buying the bottle you can can send the identification number by SMS to Kristall, the service will check whether this number is in it’s database and send return SMS telling whether you have a genuine or counterfeit bottle .

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  • http://www.productive.ro Rupert Wolfe Murray

    Kristall’s idea of checking vodka by SMS is brilliant — by flawed. Customers should be able to do this in the shop, or at the point of purchase. If they can only do it after the purchase, as your article suggests, it is too late. In the west it is easy to take back a dodgy or flawed product but in Russia it is not so simple; the shop staff can get defensive, they usually enter into denial and it’s usually more trouble than its worth. Ideally, the punter should be able to scan the bottle on the spot and get a reply within seconds. If this idea works it should spread to all high value products

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