MOSCOW — Always wanted to brag to your friends about your trip to Brazil, but couldn't afford to go? No problem!
For $500, nobody will believe you weren't sunning yourself last week on Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That's \o7you, \f7arms outstretched like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado!
Persey Tours was barely keeping the bill collectors at bay before it started offering fake vacations last year. Now it's selling 15 a month -- providing ersatz ticket stubs, hotel receipts, photos with clients' images superimposed on famous landmarks, a few souvenirs for living room shelves.
If the customer is an errant husband who wants his wife to believe he's on a fishing trip, Persey offers not just photos of him on the river, but a cellphone with a distant number, a lodge that if anyone calls will swear the husband is checked in but not available, and a few dead fish on ice.
Of course, it's not the real thing. But in Russia, this is a distinction that easily can drift into irrelevance. If there is a world capital of audacious fabrication, it must be Moscow, where fake is never a four-letter word.
Forget fake Rolexes and Gucci bags -- that's kids' stuff. Russian entrepreneurs offer million-dollar fake Ivan Shishkin paintings, forged passes to the Kremlin bearing President Vladimir V. Putin's apparent signature, false medical school diplomas and alley cats palmed off for $300 as "Siberian purebreds."
An old-fashioned brawl at a wedding can be had for $300 to $400. ( "If you read any book about traditional weddings in Russian history, there must be a fight," said 22-year-old Alexander Yermilov, who recently made a living at it.)
Any Russian market is likely to contain jars of malodorous fish eggs masquerading as $100 Beluga caviar, fizzy tap water bearing the label of a rare mountain spring, "wine" with exclusive French labels containing grape juice and cheap alcohol, and pricey Japanese cellphones or Sony PlayStation 2 consoles that were assembled on the outskirts of Moscow.
International experts say that 12% of the pharmaceutical drugs in Russia are counterfeits. In one recent study, a large proportion of the headache remedies surveyed contained no active ingredients at all.
