Counterfeits rampant on online auctions
Published March 6th, 2006
One company that makes sunglasses, Oakley Inc., went online and found more than 19,000 auctions on eBay and other Web sites last year that were selling fake Oakley sunglasses. Investigating further, Oakley traced some of the counterfeits to an Oregon man’s house, where they found 33,000 pairs.
“EBay is a huge problem for a lot of us brand holders,” said Vance Lommen, director of legal affairs for Oakley, of Foothill Ranch, Calif. It is also a problem on other auction sites, he said. “EBay at least is working with us to close these sites down,” he added.
Now that counterfeit goods have become big business at online auction sites, companies are expanding their efforts to thwart it. “We have several attorneys who do nothing but collect the information on the auction sites 24 hours a day,” Lommen said.
The auction sites are the places where small-time counterfeiters sell goods one by one under their real names, supplementing their incomes and hoping no one notices. But mixed among them are wholesalers who sell goods by the dozens, often using fake identities. It’s easy for consumers to fall prey. Counterfeiters will advertise a real pair of Oakley sunglasses and then send a fake pair to the winning bidder.
EBay says it has more than 1,000 employees working to stop fraud, counterfeiting and illegal sales on its site. But that number is dwarfed by the monitoring task at hand. The online auction site has six million new listings a day.
“Technology in this case is a double-edged sword,” said Hani Durzy, a spokesman for eBay, of San Jose. “There’s no doubt the Internet makes counterfeiting easier. The other side of that is that technology makes it harder to be anonymous.”
Durzy estimates that one one-hundredth of 1 percent of goods sold on eBay involve some kind of fraud, whether it’s counterfeiting, or trademark violations, or something else illegal. But manufacturers fear the numbers are high and getting worse.
More at http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/business/14018236.htm
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