7 Myths About Counterfeit Products, Debunked

Even a child can walk past a costume-wearing impersonator in Times Square and tell you it’s not the real Elmo. But today’s counterfeit goods are not as easy to eyeball—and they’re increasingly turning up everywhere. Counterfeits have infiltrated e-commerce sites, and it can be unbelievably hard to tell the fakes from the authentic goods.

Helping readers avoid counterfeits is important to us here at Wirecutter. We are, after all, in the business of making product recommendations and dispensing product advice. We want to make sure our readers buy our actual recommendations and not some phony knockoffs.

I spoke to Kim Gianopoulos, director of the Government Accountability Office’s International Affairs and Trade team, and Aaron Aguilar, brand protection regional manager for UL, a group that provides safety certification for electronic goods, to enhance my understanding of the new rules of shopping online—including why much of the old advice for avoiding counterfeits doesn’t apply to today’s sophisticated operations.

Myth #1: You know something is fake when the price is too good to be true.

“It used to be you go to a flea market on a weekend and find a Coach purse for $20 and you’re pretty sure that that’s not going to be a Coach purse,” said Gianopoulos, who headed a GAO team that purchased counterfeit goods on e-commerce sites as part of a government investigation into modern counterfeiting. The team found that today’s counterfeit sellers use realistic prices to fool people into thinking they’re buying an authentic item. (The findings of the investigation are detailed in a 2018 GAO report on intellectual property [PDF]). For instance, last year a writer for The Atlantic paid $925 for a Canada Goose jacket on Amazon that the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and Canada Goose later confirmed was fake. Just because the price looks real, that doesn’t mean the item is real too.

Myth #2: Fakes can take weeks to ship because they come from overseas.

A lot of counterfeiters send packaging, labels, and the fake product itself to the US in separate, smaller shipments, and their partners put those packages together here, according to the GAO analysis. This method allows counterfeiters to minimize losses if one of those shipments gets seized, and also allows the operation to mail the completed counterfeits locally (avoiding long shipping times). “When we purchased all of our items that we were checking for counterfeit, every location that we purchased it from had a US address,” said Gianopoulos.

In late 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has recruited sellers in China and has provided a logistics system to ship products to Amazon warehouses for fast fulfillment by Amazon. This arrangement helps shoppers receive things faster—but such setups can also help counterfeit goods reach you just as fast as the real thing can. Consider this: About 87 percent of Customs and Border Patrol counterfeit seizures in 2018 originated from China or Hong Kong, and of 10,780 unsafe, mislabeled, or banned products that The Wall Street Journal identified in an investigation into Amazon during the summer of 2019, 54 percent of those with an address that could be determined were being offered by sellers based in China.

Myth #3: If a seller has a high rating, you can trust them.

Nearly half the products outlined in Gianopoulos’s GAO report (PDF) turned out to be counterfeit, and on average “the sellers of the items we selected had customer ratings above 90 percent as of August 2017.” The seller ratings weren’t a reliably good indication of who to trust. Just like product reviews, seller reviews can be faked—both positively and negatively. In fact, there’s a whole cottage industry in writing fake reviews. One writer at The Hustle participated in a Facebook group that was hiring people to write fake reviews and found that he could make $10 commissions, paid through PayPal, for purchasing a product and leaving a wordy five-star product review. In a different scam, random people in the US have received a stream of unsolicited packages that were ordered by sellers who then post fake reviews on their own products fraudulently using the recipients’ names (a practice called “brushing”). While these reports focus on fake product reviews, the same mechanisms could easily be used to game seller reviews.

Myth #4: Counterfeits are really just a problem for people buying handbags and sneakers.

While apparel and accessories account for 15 percent of seizures by Customs and Border Patrol, it’s not just fake Hermès bags and Nike shoes in downtown alleys anymore. Consumer electronics made up 10 percent of seizures by the CBP in 2018 (PDF). And counterfeiters are increasingly making products that are low cost but can endanger health and safety, including personal care products, perfumes, and pharmaceuticals. “The quality of counterfeit products has greatly improved from what they used to be, and in virtually every industry you can think of,” Aguilar said. “If you can make a dollar, then a counterfeiter is going to find a way to exploit that demand.”

Myth #5: Spelling errors are a good indicator of a fake.

Counterfeiters are getting very, very good at making packaging that is identical to the real thing. The GAO purchased fake Urban Decay cosmetic eye primer, and Gianopoulos was shocked by how convincing the counterfeits were: “I wouldn’t have seen the difference if I didn’t have them side by side,” she told us. Even if it’s not absolutely identical, fake packaging can be pretty convincing since design technology makes it so easy to match and reproduce fonts. And without the real package to compare, it’s hard to be sure. We found a package for a counterfeit ‘Ove’ Glove that was nearly identical to the real thing, though the real package had a typo.

Myth #6: The worst that can happen is that you lose some money.

Counterfeits can cause health and safety problems, and those can be far worse than some lost cash. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement agencies have reported finding carcinogens, bacteria and human waste, and rodent droppings in counterfeit cosmetics. Faulty lithium-ion batteries and counterfeit chargers can damage your electronics and even catch fire. A few years ago, UL worked with Apple to test 400 randomly purchased chargers of unknown authenticity from around the world from brick-and-mortar stores, online retailers, and flea markets. “Of those 400, 99 percent of them failed the most basic electrical strength test,” Aguilar told us. “Even more alarming, 12 of them were so poorly designed and constructed that they posed a risk of lethal electrocution.”

Myth #7: Counterfeiters are only on sites like eBay and AliExpress.

Plenty of counterfeit products have been found on Amazon, and not just in the third-party marketplace but also sold through Amazon Prime, due in part to the retailer’s Fulfilled by Amazon program for third-party sellers. We purchased and confirmed several counterfeit, mislabeled, and dead-stock items through Amazon Prime over the past few months. In a recent lawsuit, Fuse Chicken, a company that manufactures tech accessories, claims that it purchased a counterfeit version of its own product that was shipped and sold by Amazon—not from a third-party seller. Amazon does more to combat counterfeiters, knockoffs, and unsafe products than eBay or AliExpress, according to brand representatives we talked with. However, the company’s measures are far from foolproof. We recommend buying items “Sold by Amazon” or from an authorized seller you know you can trust.