(CNN) A group of scientists turned sleuths in Scotland who developed a way to test the age of Scotch whisky have found that a lot of the vintage spirits aren't anywhere nearly as old as advertised.

The team with the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre hopes the test can help stop the third-party con artists who are trying to cash in on the popularity of rare Scotch by dumping cheap booze into antique bottles.

"I think that as soon as we saw that there was a lot of fake whisky out there, we thought we should be doing something about this," said Gordon Cook, a professor of environmental geochemistry at the University of Glasgow. He's the lead author of a peer-reviewed article that will be published in the journal Radiocarbon

The scientists started by investigating 221 whisky samples that were distilled between 1950 and 2015 for the radioactive isotope carbon-14. They knew when each one was distilled, so they were able to use that data to create a calibration curve to determine the age of Scotch.

"It's a very, very precise and accurate technique," Cook said.

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