The creation of the guidelines has been financially supported by the CRT Foundation. It was greatly influenced by the analysis that UNICRI conducted in its report entitled Counterfeiting: a global spread, a global threat, first published in 2007.

The publication focuses on two distinct aspects of the counterfeiting problem and both of them play a pivotal role in addressing the complex nature of counterfeiting:

investigation and law enforcement;
consumer awareness.

The guidelines respond to two needs, the first of which was providing law enforcers with a guide on how to deepen and intensify investigations in order to detect organized crime’s involvement. These guidelines are the result of an important collaborative exercise and are based on the consideration that the investigation phase must be preparatory for the judicial one. The support received by the Headquarters of the National Guardia di Finanza, Turin’s Guardia di Finanza and by the Italian National Anti-Mafia Bureau were fundamental for the drafting of these guidelines.

The strategies elaborated for this report proved to be very useful also for subsequent works, and were used for the elaboration of the training manuals written for the "Fighting Against Brand Counterfeiting in Three Key European Member States" (FAKES) project.

The other set of guidelines, on consumer awareness, aims at improving information and communication conveyed to the public with the objective of sensitizing consumers and confronting them with the reality of counterfeiting. They are aimed at guiding campaign planners in all the preparatory steps in order to properly focus the campaign and its messages in consideration of the target audience. The contacts established with the Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP) provided a great amount of information in this regard.