Amazon: More than 7 million counterfeit items seized last year
US retail and tech giant Amazon identified and properly disposed of more than 7 million counterfeit products worldwide last year, according to a report it published on Tuesday.
Since its inception in 2020, the company's Counterfeit Crimes Unit "has pursued more than 21,000 bad actors through litigation and criminal referrals to law enforcement," Amazon vice president Dharmesh Mehta said.
Measures against product piracy relate to articles that were to be brought into the logistics cycle of the world's largest online retailer as well as cases in which Amazon was able to provide companies and authorities with information about counterfeiters' warehouses, for example.
Amazon sells goods itself as well as acting as a platform for other retailers - and counterfeiters often try to use this channel as a gateway.
The company said its seller vetting has deterred bad actors from attempting to create new Amazon selling accounts.
Last year, the tech giant "stopped more than 700,000 bad actor attempts to create new selling accounts, stopping them before they were able to list a single product for sale in our store," Mehta said, down from 6 million in 2020.
In Europe, Amazon, together with German carmaker BMW, recently successfully brought a civil case to block the sale of counterfeit BMW parts and accessories at the European Union's Trademark Court in the Spanish city of Alicante.
The court ruled that four Spanish residents had attempted to sell counterfeit BMW parts and accessories on the online platform throughout Europe, and ordered the fraudsters to destroy the counterfeit products and pay compensation to the plaintiffs.
