That $1,000 Bourbon You Bought May Be a Phony
The New York Times
Counterfeiting — filling luxury bottles with cheap liquor — has hit American whiskey hard as sky-high prices raise the payoff for scammers.
To the casual eye, there was nothing amiss about the bottle of whiskey sitting on a shelf at Acker, a wine store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But for anyone who knew what to look for, the warning signs were clear.
The whiskey, a bourbon called Col. E.H. Taylor Four Grain that Acker was selling for about $1,000, normally came packaged in a special cardboard tube; this one sat there tubeless. Its strip stamp, attached over the top of the cork, was on backward.
Still, when a producer from the TV news program “Inside Edition” asked in April about the bottle’s authenticity, the store assured him it was legitimate.
