20+ years ago, I started representing seal manufacturers in Eastern Europe. You can imagine that with so much political chaos after the fall of the USSR, they were dealing with constant issues with theft, smuggling, and contraband. I got involved in a special initiative to prevent smuggling, theft, and contraband by implementing border checks, weigh stations, and other security initiatives at the point of entry and exit of countries in the region.
To give you a characteristically Eastern European example of what we were dealing with, imagine a single 40-foot container of cigarettes. The duty fees on that container alone would have been half a million dollars. Obviously, there was a lot of pressure on the side of customs to ensure that shipment remained secure and duty fees were paid, and a lot of incentive on the other side to do the opposite. Now, we’re following the path of this container. It gets checked upon entry to the country, weighed, and sealed. A day or two later, it’s leaving the country, the weight matches up, and customs opens the same seal to check the cargo. Inside are bags of potatoes weighing the same amount as the cigarettes should have, and the seal shows no evidence of tampering.
There’s only one way this could have happened, so I gathered a team to start testing seals from the manufacturers I represented and some of the most reputable and seemingly secure seals on the market. Every seal we tested could be tampered with and re-sealed without evidence using simple and highly available tools in seconds.
I alerted the seal manufacturers I represented, assuming they would immediately start re-engineering their products. They were unwilling to update their products, claiming they’ve been doing business the same way for 120 years. I answered that “seal technology is not wine or cheese. It doesn’t get better with age,” and gathered a team of 8 esteemed engineers to redesign the cargo security seal as we know it.
Redflag was born because the seals on the market did not provide a reliable way to prevent or detect tampering. It’s 2024, and we have innovated, iterated, and integrated our technology at each step. Twenty years later, we still produce tamper-resistant and tamper-evident seals as part of a complete cargo security solution. Except now, with theft, smuggling, trafficking, and contraband more prolific in the Americas than in post-soviet Eastern Europe, the world has no choice but to tune in. – Gregory Kleynerman, Founder & CEO
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