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EU's Law Enforcement Agency Closes 4,500 Websites Peddling Fake Brands (phys.org) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the justice-is-served dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: In a massive crackdown, police and law enforcement agencies across Europe have seized more than 4,500 website domains trading in counterfeit goods, often via social networks, officials said on Monday. The operation came as Europol, Europe's police agency, unveiled its newest campaign dubbed "Don't F***(AKE) Up" to stop scam websites selling fake brand names online. In the crackdown, agencies from 27 countries mostly in Europe but including from the U.S. and Canada, joined forces to shut down over 4,500 websites. They were selling everything from "luxury goods, sportswear, spare parts, electronics, pharmaceuticals, toiletries and other fake products," Europol said in a statement, without saying how long the crackdown took. An annual operation run in collaboration with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security, there was "a significant increase in the number of seized domain names compared to last year," said Europol director Rob Wainwright. As part of the crackdown, Dutch anti-fraud police arrested 12 people across The Netherlands over the past two weeks as they searched homes and warehouses. Most of the raids were prompted by online sales of counterfeit goods on social networking sites such as Facebook and Instagram. More than 3,500 items of clothing and fake luxury goods were seized in Holland, including shoes, bags and perfumes purporting to be such brands as Nike, Adidas, and Kenzo, with a market value of tens of thousands euros. Publishing a guide on how to spot fake websites and social media scams, Europol warned consumers had to be on their guard.
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EU's Law Enforcement Agency Closes 4,500 Websites Peddling Fake Brands More

EU's Law Enforcement Agency Closes 4,500 Websites Peddling Fake Brands

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  • "Don't F***(AKE) Up"

    Anyone else think this is a bit Idiocratic, or pandering to the TV crowd? I can't take it seriously.

  • Protecting whom? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Monday November 28, 2016 @06:46PM (#53381237)

    "Europol warned consumers had to be on their guard"
    I don't think that anyone buying cheap "brand name" items from a web site is deluded enough to think they are getting the real thing. They realize that brands charge a premium for the social cachet and not necessarily quality. People are just purchasing the cachet at a discount.
    This is much more about protecting the profits of the brands than protecting the consumer.

    • Exactly. I buy "fake" soccer shoes all the time. I can get a $150 pair for $49. Sure it is "fake" but it is identical and good enough for my purpose. The only people they are "protecting" are the corporations.

      • "Exactly. I buy "fake" soccer shoes all the time. I can get a $150 pair for $49. Sure it is "fake" but it is identical and good enough for my purpose. "

        Small wonder, since the same Chinese kid made both of them.

    • Don't expect that because you are smart enough to think like this that everyone is.

      Have you ever considered why 419 scams and "Hello this is Windows support" scams are around after decades? It's because people fall for them.

      Consider the national lottery system? Jackpot gets bigger all the time. And the odds are adjusted appropriately. That means you have a far greater chance of winning nothing. So if you play trying to lose, you are almost 100% guaranteed to get precisely what you wanted. Just make sure to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave420 ( 699308 )

      I'm sure you are correct for most people, but not everyone. Those who might be mislead also deserve protection under the law, and this is what's happening. It also stops people from knowingly buying fakes from these sites and selling them as the real things in shops, etc. I don't know how anyone can be upset with the law cracking down on counterfeit goods.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I don't think they are really serious. I know this doctor in town that sells fake tits and the women he sells them to try to pass them off as the real thing.

  • And in other news (Score:3)

    by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Monday November 28, 2016 @06:47PM (#53381249) Homepage Journal

    In other news, Josef Prusa has his PayPal account locked [twitter.com] the day before black Friday.

    Prusa is the maker of the (fairly well known) Prusa 3-d printer [hackaday.com], and as is typical in these PayPal situations, he hasn't the first clue why it happened. They locked all his funds - he can't fulfill purchases and can't even refund his customers.

    At least in the Europe case it was the police doing it. When companies do this on request of other companies it puts them in a very hard position.

    I wonder how many *non fake* websites got caught up in the sweep, and how many legitimate businesses will be trashed as a result?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      His first mistake was using PayPal. Everyone knows by now PP will do anything to make a quick buck.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )
        And basic business logic is you need to ensure that you have multiple ways to accept payment (also IT logic, single point of failure and all that).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          And basic business logic is you need to ensure that you have multiple ways to accept payment (also IT logic, single point of failure and all that).

          Unless you want credit cards, which make it quite hard.

          Paypal is probably the ONLY provider that makes it too easy to accept a credit card on practically no requirements - most other merchant accounts have transaction and amount quotas you meet in order to get your negotiated rates - miss your quota and you'll get slapped with extra fees and increased rates.

          And a

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by guruevi ( 827432 )

            Not sure how long you haven't looked for CC processors but these days there are plenty that neither charge monthly fees nor quota's, just a flat or percentage based fee. PayPal is actually on the higher end of the cost spectrum.

            Matter of fact, plenty of them have compatible API's with other providers so you don't even need to make custom modules for your site.

  • That's great news! Trademarks are the one part of IP I can happily support. If I want to buy Foo brand shoes, and I see a shoebox marked with Foo's logo, I want to be reasonably sure that it actually contains Foo-approved shoes. Sure, people try to abuse trademarks ("you're not allowed to use our name in a news article criticizing us!" and other jackassery), but the actual concept of trademarks is great. This is the kind of IP law enforcement I actually want to see.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      From an end user point of view, they should only target misrepresented products if those products are of worse quality than the falsely advertised products. The law should protect the quality of the product and not the quality of the bullshit advertising associated with the all to many genuinely 'bad' products with genuinely false advertising claims ;).

      • Quality is subjective. You can't honestly insist there be some judgemental body that eats money deciding if something is "of the same quality"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Not it is not, when associated with marketing it is but when associated with reality it is not. Look no further than the sneaker market, there was a company the spent more money on advertising than they do on making their shoes, spent big with sporting knob heads, you know they type, "it's not lying, it's acting". Now the way you get tell fakes from the genuine product is because they were made better and lasted longer than the genuine product and they people publicly demonstrated that quality difference o

          • > Now the way you get tell fakes from the genuine product is because they were made better and lasted longer than the genuine product

            Generally, no. The fake sneakers tend to be made with poor quality vinylized fabric rather than leather, the soles are thin and wear out quickly, and the stitches are more sparse and seams done more with glue than with stronger stitching. And since they're fake, the chances of getting a refund from the manufacturer are very poor, much as they are with other goods.

            The fake n

            • Yes, it's a lot of different things that all need to be handled on a case by case basis.

              You pays yer money and you takes yer risk.

      • Uh, no. It's not a standards mark but an indicator of origin. I may think Foo brand shoes suck, but if I want genuine Foo for whatever reason, I want to know I'm buying genuine Foo. Maybe their quality sucks but they're made in a well-respected factory in Colorado, they treat their employees well, and they only emit pure oxygen and distilled water from their factories. The Chinese knockoffs might be better, but I want the Colorado-made product. The whole point of trademarks is that only Foo can claim to mak
        • There's something to be said about knowing that you aren't getting products sourced from x when you don't want products sourced from x. One aspect of the law that seems little known is that if I buy shoes branded x, and I rebrand them y, company x can sue you for it.
      • No, the only thing that should be protected is the consumer's ability to determine the source.
    • Misrepresentation of the origin of a good does not need trademark to have a special protection in order to be illegal.

      • huh?

      • A counterfeit brand can have a peel-away label on it that informs the buyer that it is not a Coach handbag. The buyer can make the choice to buy the labeled handbag and peel away said label if they wish to do so.

        It's wrong to deceive the purchaser, but we all know that many people who buy knock-off goods are aware of what they're buying.

    • Copyrights and other IP protections can bite the dust as far as I'm concerned. If I choose to pay more to support the creator of a work, I want to be sure that the creator of the work I chose to support benefits.

    • I wonder if there's any chance of them actually going after the source of these products as well? Because, you know... heaven forbid we offend our Valuable Trading Partner(tm) where all these fakes are coming from, right? After all, we want to sell our cheap Chinese widget with our logo on it that costs 10x as much, not the fake brand Chinese widget that probably comes from the same factory after hours.

      If you outsource manufacturing to a country that doesn't give a crap about international IP laws, this i

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • doesn't deserve "saftey"
  • I posted in a recent comment [slashdot.org] about abolishing intellectual property. Misrepresentation of the origin of a good does not need trademark to have a special protection in order to be illegal.

  • 4,500 down, 22,876,341 to go.

    Still, I'm all for it and it's a step in the right direction. Perhaps a small bounty could be paid for reporting sites that are found to be peddling fake brands.

  • Next, fake Craigslist ads!!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Between the Nigerian scammers selling *everything* to suckers, but especially renting apartments "that they can't live in because they're caring for their poor sick mother, but here are pictures and you can look at it from outside", and the *flooding* of Craigslist by the fraudulent subscription room rental site www.roomster,com, there are almost no legitimate room shares left on Craigslist. Roomster is particularly nasty: they seem to be only the one company, but they seem to be more than 80% of the Craigs

  • People who make a profit by ripping off the hard work of other people (whether it be someone selling a knockoff Rolex watch, someone selling a knockoff Gucci bag, someone selling a device that violates the GPL, someone selling bootleg LEGO sets or whatever else) disgust me and the more such people who get prosecuted for their crimes the better.

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