The International Chamber of Commerce announced yesterday it is stepping up its efforts to squash piracy and counterfeiting rings that together cost the American economy $250 billion a year with tools that include a savvy new Web site and a worldwide public relations campaign.

The chamber’s new initiative, Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy, Bascap, distinguishes itself with its organizational — rather than operational — approach to fighting intellectual property pirates. Its campaign includes a Web based algorithmic search of the world’s databases and press reports of crackdowns on bogus goods.

Bascap’s daily Web report allows governments and corporations to see what products are fraudulently copied and where they are in demand. “Attempting to determine the true cost of counterfeiting on a global basis is extremely elusive: Pirates don’t submit annual reports to Wall Street,” a spokesman for the chamber, Jeffrey Hardy, said during the unveiling of the initiative.

As of yesterday, the chamber’s Web site reported that during the past 24 hours 18 seizures in various countries around the globe netted more than 1 million counterfeit products worth more than $1.5 million. “We’re going across borders and across sectors to connect the dots of this entire matrix,” Mr. Hardy said.

Part of the chamber’s publicity blitz includes the release of a new survey of 48 multinational corporations that concludes that most nations are not doing nearly enough to crack down on their counterfeiting rings. The most egregious and dangerous piracy operations are in China, Russia, India, and Brazil, according to the survey.

The secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce, Guy Sebban, points to the fact that it was a counterfeit part that fell off an airplane and into the engine of a Concorde seven years ago — the only time the supersonic jet crashed in three decades. He said the public largely views intellectual property theft as simply bootleg movie DVDs and not fake drugs and engine parts, both of which can be deadly.

Mr. Sebban, a Frenchman, has lobbied for stricter piracy laws at high-profile events like the Cannes Film Festival. He has also met with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. What he found is that national leaders begin to crack down on property theft and piracy only when their governments’ lack of action is exposed in the press. “That’s why we’re joining with CEOs to get our message out. Governments will get more responsive,” he said.

The executive vice president and general counsel at NBC Universal, Rick Cotton, said the new initiative forces leaders to look beyond counterfeiting rings in various sectors and instead look at the issue as a worldwide problem. “Politicians tend to identify the Achilles’ heel of each sector. But when you begin listing them — auto parts, pharmaceuticals, software, luxury goods, electronics — you have a broad agenda and you’re better able to get a broad range of support,” he said.

The private sector has combated counterfeiters on its own for decades. But now that companies have more government enforcement of anti-piracy laws, many executives think they’ll have a fighting chance against fraud. “Corporate responsibility entails being responsible to each other,” the senior vice president for anti-piracy at Universal Music Group, David Benjamin, said.