The Unexpected Consequences of Accidentally Buying a Counterfeit

January 19, 2018 11:36 AM

Your Amazon Order Could Get You in Trouble With Customs. You wouldn’t think online shopping could get you in trouble with customs, but if you accidentally order counterfeit merchandise on Amazon it just might. If you plan on doing a lot of traveling, you probably want to double check your orders from now on. It just might get you kicked out of CBP's Trusted Traveler program.
posted by JoeZydeco (44 comments total)

I can't believe they make these poor people wait in line will all the plebs. This is truly a 1% dystopia.
posted by signal at 11:56 AM on January 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

The truly awful part of this is that, even with checking over every inch of the listing, there's often no way to know. In this case, a Google result would show that LVMH doesn't actually allow their products on Amazon - thus making any sale there sketchy - but even then you'd already have to know what and how to search for.

Hell, now that knockoffs can show up as "sold by Amazon" under the same exact listing as the official products - and since Amazon will ship third-party items when first-party versions are ordered (that Apple lightning adapter in what appears to be an official Apple box, for instance, might well be a poorly made Chinese knockoff)- even the savviest person has no way of knowing what they're getting.
posted by Molten Berle at 11:58 AM on January 19, 2018 [13 favorites]

It's less about having to queue with the plebs than about getting on an opaque government watchlist with no notification for making what you think is a legit online purchase.
posted by GuyZero at 11:58 AM on January 19, 2018 [51 favorites]

Amazon's continued problems with mixing goods from multiple sources that are supposedly the same thing is a big reason why I don't buy anything but e-books off of them.
posted by egypturnash at 12:02 PM on January 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

I'm with egypturnash. I basically don't buy anything from Amazon any more. Between the excessive shittiness of Amazon Logistics and the uncertainty about the true provenance of their products, I'm more than happy to shop elsewhere to get genuine products delivered within the promised timeframes.
posted by ged at 12:05 PM on January 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

I only buy shipped and sold from Amazon.com and anything else I figure is counterfeit.
posted by Talez at 12:08 PM on January 19, 2018

I can't believe they make these poor people wait in line will all the plebs. This is truly a 1% dystopia.

The thing is, Trusted Traveler and TSA Pre should be how the experience needs to be normally. When I went back to Australia coming into the country I didn't professionally interact with an Australian customs officer until I got to the declare vs not-declare lines and handed them my card. I put my passport in, it checked me off, I walked through. Which to me proves there's absolutely no reason for CBP and TSA to give everyone the stink eye and the third degree.

But apparently American Exceptionalism applies in this arena too. Everyone must be treated with suspicion because the United States is an exclusive club or some shit.
posted by Talez at 12:14 PM on January 19, 2018 [23 favorites]

I only buy shipped and sold from Amazon.com and anything else I figure is counterfeit.

But, as some found out during the 2017 Eclipse, Amazon was mixing counterfeit paper glasses into their inventory without tracking what was coming from where.

Some customers got recall notices on perfectly usable glasses, and others had the opposite consequences. The lawsuits are starting.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:15 PM on January 19, 2018 [13 favorites]

For many of the things I buy from Amazon, counterfeit is not really an issue, and choosing only Prime items makes sure (almost) everything ships from the US.

But there is a handbag I want that I've had my eye on, and the Amazon price is good, but I keep waffling that I should buy it directly from the designer's website instead.
posted by Squeak Attack at 12:15 PM on January 19, 2018

But, as some found out during the 2017 Eclipse, Amazon was mixing counterfeit paper glasses into their inventory without tracking what was coming from where.

There's a difference between brand counterfeiting and product counterfeiting though. This problem is specifically to do with brand counterfeiting.
posted by Talez at 12:18 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Unexpected Consequences of Accidentally Buying a Counterfeit

What if I buy a counterfeit on purpose
posted by chavenet at 12:22 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

What if I buy a counterfeit on purpose

Then those miscreants send you an authentic item!
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:27 PM on January 19, 2018 [11 favorites]

you cannot win!
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:27 PM on January 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

Does Amazon somehow remove itself from the loop with third-party purchases, so the vendor is the exporter and buyer is the importer? That seems to be the take-away from that article.

My impression of trying to get problems resolved with Amazon is that they throw money at the problem but they don't fix it, because just throwing a little money at it each time it happens is more cost-effective than fixing it. Even if exactly the same thing happens again, it turns out they didn't fix it the first time, and they just throw a little money at it again. Although nothing on the level of this particular problem.
posted by lagomorphius at 12:31 PM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

So, Amazon wants to morph into a bigger Ebay, but without the obvious provenance of products that Ebay, at least, has? Peachy.

Why do so many big companies inevitably inflict decay on themselves?
posted by Thorzdad at 12:35 PM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

There's a difference between brand counterfeiting and product counterfeiting though. This problem is specifically to do with brand counterfeiting.

But wouldn't you agree that the root cause in both cases appear to be the same?

Both Reed and the eclipse viewers thought they were buying from Amazon first-party stock with no indication otherwise.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:36 PM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

So, Amazon wants to morph into a bigger Ebay, but without the obvious provenance of products that Ebay, at least, has?

Remind me to tell you the story about the time I bought a netbook off of eBay and had to have a few nice long talks with the local cops who intercepted the shipment because it had been purchased with a stolen credit card and drop-shipped to me.
posted by hanov3r at 12:41 PM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

About a year ago I bought a cheap copy of The Blood of a Poet. The case it came in was in Korean, and the disc itself was actually a straight up rip of the Criterion Collection release. Criterion logo, extras, menus... the whole thing. Kind of amazing. Not that there are bootlegs on Amazon (although that was a bit surprising), but that there's enough of a market in Korea for 1930s, French surrealist cinema to merit bootlegging. Piracy, I can see. But physical discs?
posted by brundlefly at 1:01 PM on January 19, 2018

They are all trying to be everything now. Like, both Newegg and Best Buy have third party marketplace listings mixed with standard results, just like Amazon.

Ideally, eBay would be a "legitimately sketchy" source. Like, if you buy and sell at auction, it is always buyer beware, it is meant for experts. It's been 5 years since eBay cared at all about that market though, 10 years since they've encouraged it.

That's incredibly frustrating for me. I want legitimately sketchy sources of surplus, I want an outlet for my legitimately sketchy items. Unfortunately, eBay monopolizes the space while actively making the experience kind of crappy.
posted by Chuckles at 1:02 PM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Why do so many big companies inevitably inflict decay on themselves?

Because shareholders demand ever-increasing profits. It's no longer enough for a company to do one thing well and make a little money from it. They have to forever expand and cut corners and "innovate" until it's a useless collapsing mass. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:22 PM on January 19, 2018 [24 favorites]

Why does anyone but Amazon take the fall for this?
posted by oceanjesse at 1:29 PM on January 19, 2018 [9 favorites]

But, as some found out during the 2017 Eclipse, Amazon was mixing counterfeit paper glasses into their inventory without tracking what was coming from where.

Yup. Ironically, "shipped from Amazon" might be the least reliable source, because of this exact issue.

For repeated purchases where quality is really important to me (i.e., bird food), I do order through Amazon for the free Prime shipping, but I go to the one specific storefront that I know ships the right thing every time.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:54 PM on January 19, 2018

But wouldn't you agree that the root cause in both cases appear to be the same?

Not really. A counterfeit product means that the supply chain was fraudulent. Counterfeit brand means the vendor was fraudulent. Two very different things.
posted by Talez at 2:00 PM on January 19, 2018

They are all trying to be everything now. Like, both Newegg and Best Buy have third party marketplace listings mixed with standard results, just like Amazon.

Yeah, it's really frustrating. I used to think of Newegg as the trustworthy place for electronics, and now I don't even bother checking there. If I'm going to have to sift through results to try to figure out who I'm actually ordering from and whether I should, I might as well just do that on Amazon.
posted by trig at 2:11 PM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

About a year ago I bought a cheap copy of The Blood of a Poet. The case it came in was in Korean, and the disc itself was actually a straight up rip of the Criterion Collection release. Criterion logo, extras, menus... the whole thing. Kind of amazing. Not that there are bootlegs on Amazon (although that was a bit surprising), but that there's enough of a market in Korea for 1930s, French surrealist cinema to merit bootlegging. Piracy, I can see. But physical discs?

Everything gets counterfeited. Some years ago I was visiting a friend in Thailand. I had a day to kill so I picked a copy of Orwell's "Burma Days" off his shelf. It was a paperback Penguin edition. My friend thought it was interesting I happened to pick that particular book. (I picked it because it looked like it was short enough to read in a day.) He asked me to examine it carefully and tell me if I thought there was anything strange about it. So I read it, and couldn't find the least thing wrong with it. He then showed me the various little inconsistencies in the binding, printing, etc. that revealed that it wasn't a genuine Penguin, but a counterfeit. Yes, for some reason, somebody in Asia thought there was a market for counterfeit copies of "Burma Days".
posted by lagomorphius at 2:32 PM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Amazon's continued problems with mixing goods from multiple sources that are supposedly the same thing is a big reason why I don't buy anything but e-books off of them.

I’ve suspected they mix the “same” items provided by third-party sellers with their regular stock ever since i ordered a new copy of a book “shipped and sold by Amazon” which should have been the current version that had its cover design last updated in the 2000s (part of Penguin’s classic literature series) but i received the 1982 edition, possibly unread (spine was tight) but with extremely yellowed paper, a sun-faded cover, and some shelf wear (and a bad cover design).

I suspect that it was technically new (sitting in a store or warehouse for 30+ years) but was a copy provided by a third-party seller. When Penguin produced the newer edition nothing changed in the text besides the copyright page, so the ISBN remained the same. Still, it showed me that at least some times Amazon will mix their stock with items from other sellers. (I returned the book.)

There’s a non-book item i’ve been considering ordering lately that is said to have counterfeits which look the same but are not built well (i’d never buy one via eBay). There is one legitimate, authorized by the manufacturer, third-party seller on Amazon that participates in the “shipped by Amazon” program. I did plenty of research to confirm that this seller really is authorized by the manufacturer, but i feel i can’t trust Amazon not to send me one provided by one of the other sellers of that item.
posted by D.C. at 2:37 PM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

He then showed me the various little inconsistencies in the binding, printing, etc. that revealed that it wasn't a genuine Penguin, but a counterfeit. Yes, for some reason, somebody in Asia thought there was a market for counterfeit copies of "Burma Days".

In this case, and in the DVD case above, I think it's the publisher cachet that makes the counterfeit worth the effort. Penguin and Criterion are not only well-known media brands, but brands that signal a kind of cultural prestige, since they're 'classic' and 'high brow'. Stealing digital copies of the works is, these days, trivial. Producing them will also be cheap. There's probably a decent margin in counterfeiting the entire Criterion catalogue or entire Penguin catalogue, even the obscure stuff, given the brand recognition. (Plenty of people like to collect the whole catalogues, or just random selections, anything by the brand, just to have them and show them off, or to use them as photo props/backdrops for their Instas, etc.)
posted by halation at 2:40 PM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I only buy shipped and sold from Amazon.com and anything else I figure is counterfeit.

The only way to be sure is to look through all the 3rd party seller listings for the item and see if any of them are "fulfilled via Amazon" if any are then that 3rd party stock will be sitting on the Amazon warehouse shelf. If there are no 3rd party 'fulfilled by Amazon' listings then it is pretty likely you will get something thats been ordered directly by Amazon.

Saying all that, I once ordered an item direct from Amazon and was sent a slightly different item with a white sticker carefully placed over the model number on the box. Amazon did sort it out but it made me wonder what they were playing at!
posted by Lanark at 2:50 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Regarding counterfeit books in Asia: I lived in Phnom Penh for a while, and you can pick up *lots* of impressively obscure counterfeit academic books on Cambodian history in Cambodian markets. I also recall seeing similar counterfeits of rather obscure books on various Southeast Asian nations in Thailand. (I own one of those bootleg copies of Burma Days).

The market is, I think, English-speaking tourists who want to read something relevant to the place where they’re traveling. Since there’s often only so many books in English on Southeast Asian topics, you’ll get some seemingly weird stuff that still - far as I can tell - sell pretty well to tourists.
posted by faineg at 3:32 PM on January 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Honest Amazon seller here... It's a problem for us too, e.g., when a counterfeit gets sent to a customer and we have to eat the cost, take the reputation hit and accumulate demerits from Amazon. For frequently counterfeited items like toys, Amazon limits who can sell them and sometimes you have to show receipts from authorized wholesalers first. Theoretically third party sellers can choose to have their items "commingled," in which Amazon sends any old one from the most convenient warehouse, or to have Amazon send the exact stock provided. Amazon charges sellers more for the latter and the approach requires sellers to label their inventory. But the reality is Amazon can't be relied upon to send your goods to your customers. The issue goes beyond counterfeiting, e.g., Lego sets with the minifigs removed, foxed books labeled as new, slightly different models mis-labeled, etc. It's frustrating.
posted by carmicha at 4:25 PM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Why on earth the govt care about a consumer purchase when determining if you get to go through the speedy line at the airport? How quickly will they broaden this power to keep people from travelling alltogether? Papers please?
posted by kokaku at 4:37 PM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Why on earth the govt care about a consumer purchase when determining if you get to go through the speedy line at the airport?

Global Entry does 2 things:

1) You get to use a kiosk to handle immigration upon re-entry to the US (instead of talking to agent / waiting in line --- nowadays everyone uses a kiosk, but if you don't have GE you still have to wait for an agent afterwards).

2) You get an express customs line and greatly reduced chance of customs inspection.

This is about (2), since the argument is you're committing a customs violation with your purchase, so you can't be trusted to not cheat customs at the airport.

[As a side note, GE - which includes PreCheck - is not exactly a 1% kind of thing as mentioned above --- it's $20/year. Not free, sure, but solidly middle-class-affordable.]
posted by thefoxgod at 4:43 PM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

But yeah, if the government considers this an important customs violation, I would be worried beyond just "qualifying for Global Entry". Would they deny entry to someone with a visa / ESTA because of this?
posted by thefoxgod at 4:47 PM on January 19, 2018

Thing is, the dude's Rimowa suitcase could have been completely legit, but the USA's intellectual property laws and protections against grey market items can allow the US branch of any company to stop any other imports. The classic case used to be Mamiya cameras: their importer held trademark protection, and thus any not imported through them was effectively counterfeit. All the fun details are in the 1982 case Bell & Howell: Mamiya Co. v. Masel Supply Co.. I heard rumours of grey market Mamiyas being destroyed at customs, but the real threat was lack of repair support from Mamiya USA.

More recently, Fluke forced SparkFun to incinerate 2,000 multimeters because they were yellow.
posted by scruss at 5:49 PM on January 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

Anti-counterfeiting laws are even more bullshit than copyright laws. At least with copyright laws, you can argue that you're benefiting from something you didn't make, and where the production cost for you is essentially zero. But a suitcase? It's made from the same materials, and presumably costs about the same to make. Yeah, the counterfeiters save the development costs, but on consumer items those are so spread out as to probably be close to zero per item. It's just protectionist bullshit that you can't buy something that looks like something else.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:38 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

They are all trying to be everything now. Like, both Newegg and Best Buy have third party marketplace listings mixed with standard results, just like Amazon.

Best Buy got rid of their third-party marketplace a year or two ago. It wasn’t a profitable venture because it was confusing to customers, and made BBY basically compete with itself on pricing.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:00 PM on January 19, 2018

So if I understand this correctly, a massive multinational run by a 1% gazillionaire is running its supply chains in such a way that counterfeit goods, in violation of US IP law, are being sold to consumers. And the solution is to punish the consumer, while government at every level bows and scrapes to see who can give the company the biggest tax breaks? WTF is going on here?
posted by Meatbomb at 7:43 PM on January 19, 2018 [17 favorites]

Joakim Ziegler: "But a suitcase? It's made from the same materials, and presumably costs about the same to make."

That assumes it's a good counterfeit. Plenty of shitty examples and a spectrum between. The difference between a suitcase that can reasonably expected to last many trips and one that breaks the first time though baggage handling spreading your clothes across a tarmac can come down to poor quality control or selection of materials in apparently identical items. This is a real problem (enough so that it has created a vernacular eg: chinesium) when it comes to stuff like bolts or anything safety related. Remember the capacitor plague a few years.
posted by Mitheral at 9:37 PM on January 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

WTF is going on here?

The Free Market™, duh.

I don't know why Customs bothers to inspect anything smaller than a fucking shipping container, since they clearly aren't doing a very good job of that. I mean, if we take on premise that "counterfeit" brands are really a problem worth solving (which I'm not sure I agree with), the low-hanging fruit seems like it's people importing the stuff in quantities, not one-offs. Going after people buying stuff on Amazon is straight gestapo scaremongering tactics.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:05 AM on January 20, 2018

I have a pretty good story about this!

I have friends who launched a fairly successful product a few years. You might even own it! Problem is, people were ordering their thing and getting a counterfeit in the mail.

They managed to track it down to resellers- Basically, all of Item X goes into a bin. So you could send a batch of counterfeit X to AmaZon and they'd toss it in a bin with the Real X provided you could fool them. When the customer ordered Item x, they might get the real deal sitting in the bin or they might get a counterfeit Item X.

So the friends go to amazon and are like "We want to disable 3rd party reselling" and Amazon says "No, only health and wellness products can do this".

Friends threaten to start shipping every Item X with a wrapped razor blade in the package to qualify for Health and Beauty verticals. Because Amazon is pretty silo'ed, dept-wise, they don't want to lose the Item X sales in its home dept. They back down and now there's no 3rd party reselling on just Item X.

Point being, from a consumer standpoint, there was 0 way for anyone in the chain to know if the item was counterfeit or not. Making trouble for the consumer seems stupid.
posted by GilloD at 9:53 AM on January 20, 2018 [11 favorites]

I read this story a bit differently than the reporting about it. A fancy expensive Brand, annoyed with Amazon's refusal to human-inspect-and-approve every Brand item sold through Amazon, is now taking action against individual buyers to put more pressure on Amazon to solve the problem.

All of these articles summarize very clearly as "buyers of expensive Brand items are at risk when using Amazon", i.e. FUD. Yes, this could happen to you, but the chances of any random "you" having both money to spend on Brand items and also having Global Entry (or even knowing what that is) is vanishingly small.

Making trouble for the consumer makes trouble for Amazon, because it teaches consumers that Amazon is "risky", and that if they want a "safe" purchasing experience, they need to use "not Amazon" to buy their Brand item. This plays very well into the Brand handbook ("authorized resellers", "luxury experience", "retail stores", etc).

Birkenstock, for comparison, outright prohibits the sale of their branded item on Amazon, issues takedowns, and permabans any authorized reseller who lists an item for sale on Amazon. They don't attack consumers to solve their problem, and for the most part they've been quite successful without any serious PR issues to date.

In both cases, the Brand's beef is with Amazon, not with the consumer — but in the case linked above, I'm pretty sure the Brand is using the bad press generated by their attack on the *buyer* as leverage to get back at the *seller* — Amazon.
posted by crysflame at 1:17 PM on January 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Amazon is technically capable of spending a portion of their revenue to spot check Brand items to verify authenticity. Their unwillingness to do so is, presumably, what led to this Brand cold war using a customer as leverage in the first place.
posted by crysflame at 1:21 PM on January 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

I think I missed a step. He didn't get the item, but wasn't notified that it was counterfeit? Amazon turned over a purchaser list? I don't understand the sequence that led to the Trusted Traveler problem.
posted by etaoin at 12:06 PM on January 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm going to guess that customs intercepted the package, opened it, discovered it was counterfeit/not authorized, and then confiscated it and wrote down his address as the importer. He wasn't notified because it wasn't serious enough to send the police knocking or whatever else they would do for crimes that necessitated additional charges but that address still ended up on the list that got him kicked out of trusted traveler.
posted by mosst at 6:04 AM on January 22, 2018 [2 favorites]