MINI establishes FMEF

MINI has established the FMEF (Fake MINI Eradication Force) to stamp out misleading advertisements.

According to the carmaker in recent weeks a number of vehicles crudely disguised to look like MINI Cooper and MINI Cooper S models have been appearing in online and classified advertising publications like CarPoint, Carsales and Unique Cars magazine. Even worse, several MINI faker-ers have been spotted pedalling their fake MINI wares to innocent victims in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

In the defence of its brand identity, MINI will begin taking action against the perpetrators.

As a first step, MINI is alerting the Australian car buying public to the existence of the counterfeiting ring, and urges buyers to exhibit extreme caution when offered a vehicle for sale purporting to be a genuine MINI.

Justin Hocevar, National Manager MINI said: “We have a duty to our owners to protect their valuable investment and to prospective pre-loved MINI buyers to warn them of the pitfalls of buying non-genuine used MINIs.

“That’s why we’ve constituted FMEF to work with us in this endeavour. And we have written to all our owners and supplied them with a FMEF pack in the hope that they can assist us in our quest to stamp out the MINI faker-ers before it’s too late.”

According to Mr Hocevar, the MINI faker-ers have attempted to emulate many of the iconic MINI styling cues in order to fool unsuspecting buyers, applying items such as customised roof flags, mirror caps and bonnet stripes

“Just because a vehicle has bonnet stripes or a Union Jack roof decal, does not make it a MINI” he said.

“The first fakes we detected were quite convincing. However, as the faker-ers have grown more and more greedy, their attention to detail has slipped and the ones we are seeing now are a pretty poor pastiche of parts purporting to pass themselves off as MINIs,” he said.

Buyers of pre-loved cars discovering counterfeit MINIs are asked not to approach or try to make contact with the faker-ers involved. These are desperate people who have demonstrated they’ll stop at nothing in their quest to infest the market with these ghastly fakes, MINI says

Instead, anyone with information concerning these vehicles is urgently asked to visit FMEF online