EU's Law Enforcement Agency Closes 4,500 Websites Peddling Fake Brands (phys.org) 72
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.
Idiocracy (Score:2)
Anyone else think this is a bit Idiocratic, or pandering to the TV crowd? I can't take it seriously.
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Nope, they protect Chinese counterfeit, which don't deserve any help.
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"Nope, they protect Chinese counterfeit, which don't deserve any help."
Made by the same Chinese kids that produce the real thing for LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE.
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Maybe Euro-humour from someone whose first language isn't English.
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Ah, be fair now..
She lost to a political novice with enough negatives to make Weiner blush even though she out spent, out maneuvered and should have wiped the floor with his fake tan.. He had never run for ANYTHING, never won an election, even for dog catcher. She should have won, no questions, no chance for anything else. At leas it was close but *any* other opponent would have been dead by election day after that Access Hollywood tape. And how the 3 AM twitter wars didn't end his chances I will never k
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Trump roped a lot of inferior politicians together and dragged them all under. It's a remarkable achievement.
The Clinton Family is truncated.
The Bush dynasty is terminated.
The US Chamber of Commerce is disconnected.
Even the bloody Koch Brothers are unhappy.
Re: Hillary!'s web site is next (Score:1)
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I came here to say, "Well, I guess the Ivanka shit is gone."
Protecting whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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"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.
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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
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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.
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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)
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?
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His first mistake was using PayPal. Everyone knows by now PP will do anything to make a quick buck.
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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
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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.
Trademarks protect purchasers, not sellers (Score:5, Interesting)
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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 ;).
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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
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> 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
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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.
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huh?
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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.
Agree with you. (Score:1)
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.
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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
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the Ben Frank quote below (Score:2)
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How this relates to abolishing IP (Score:1)
4,500? (Score:2)
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)
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
This is a good thing (Score:2)
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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And when you sell that fake Rolex for thousands to some guy whose only error was to believe you and the name on the product, nobody loses? Sheesh. Consumer protection laws exist for a reason.