YCD News – Amazon has been working to protect customers, brands, sales partners, and its own stores from counterfeiting, fraud, and abuse. To achieve this goal, Amazon established its Counterfeiting Crimes Unit (CCU) in 2020.
Recently, Amazon announced its latest progress in the field of counterfeiting. This year, Amazon CCU launched several raids in collaboration with law enforcement agencies across the globe and successfully seized hundreds of wrongdoers, including manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors.
Massive Raid Against Counterfeit Auto Parts in China
In March of this year, with intelligence provided by CCU, members of the Amazon team, along with approximately 150 officials from China’s law enforcement agency (the Public Security Bureau), raided five large-scale counterfeit auto parts manufacturing locations.
Together with law enforcement officials, Amazon seized a variety of items from offices, warehouses, factories, and individual residences, including business licenses, more than 40,000 counterfeit auto parts from more than 30 automotive brands, and car logo stickers that infringed on intellectual property rights. In addition, law enforcement officials confiscated 270 pieces of production equipment used to manufacture counterfeit auto parts to completely eliminate the opportunity for other wrongdoers to use these machines.
CCU cracks down on counterfeiting gangs across Europe
In May of this year, Amazon partnered with the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) in London and toothbrush manufacturer Philips (Sonicare) to identify and crack down on multiple counterfeit gangs attempting to manufacture and sell fake electric toothbrush brushes heads within the UK.
PIPCU, supported by Amazon CCU, conducted raids at multiple businesses and individual homes in London, where PIPCU officers seized thousands of counterfeit toothbrush brush heads and arrested a man in connection with the case.
This comes on the heels of more action by Amazon in Europe. Amazon partnered with office supply manufacturer Brother to file a civil lawsuit against multiple sellers of Brother printer toner cartridges.
Amazon and Brother jointly filed the lawsuit with German law enforcement authorities. The lawsuit alleges that the sellers conspired to sell counterfeit products together and attempted to evade Amazon’s and Brother’s surveillance systems.
It’s worth noting that last September, Amazon also partnered with Chinese law enforcement authorities to conduct seven additional raids on 30 miscreants in four cities. During those raids, law enforcement seized hundreds of counterfeit clothing and shoes and confiscated nearly 50,000 infringing tags from more than a dozen brands.
YCD has learned that over the past year, Amazon has prosecuted or reported more than 1,300 offending sellers and destroyed more than 6 million counterfeit products in China, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. Looking ahead, Amazon will continue to invest in machine learning technology and intellectual property protection to improve the detection and protection of counterfeit products to further ensure the security and trustworthiness of the platform.