Fake cigars piss me off as well. Wish people would stop but I don't think that will happen.
I agree, what is a barcode going to do really?
The best adivce from a lot of people I've heard to combat fakes are:
1) Buy from a vendor you trust. If you've bought real ones before, good guess is they'll be real again.
2) Not a lot of places do this but I've heard that if you open a brand new box and smoke one cigar to see if it's real, then buy it, you'll save yourself a lot of cash. Another idea is to buy a single and see if the single is real or not.
3) Kinda ties in with step 2, if you smell and smoke one right away and you regularly smoke them, you should know if it is real. To sum it up, don't buy a brand new box of cigars you've never tried before. Pretty simple. This message mostly goes for the tourist smokers who go to Cuba or somewhere tropical and just buy a box because it's cheap. If it's cheap, most likely it's a fake.
Hope this hasn't already been covered in another topic, but I thought it would be useful for some of the newbie's.