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EU's Law Enforcement Agency Closes 4,500 Websites Peddling Fake Brands (phys.org)
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.
Anyone else think this is a bit Idiocratic, or pandering to the TV crowd? I can't take it seriously.
Alternative Right.
Money talks.
Aliexpress still works. That's a relief.
Wow, phys.org is less relevant than Slashdot.
"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.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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 know.
Clinton's unexpected losing was an absolute atrocity, of Biblical proportions. For which I am both grateful and surprised.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
In other news, Josef Prusa has his PayPal account locked the day before black Friday.
Prusa is the maker of the (fairly well known) Prusa 3-d printer, 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?
That's great news! Trademarks are the one part of IP I can happily support. If I want to buy Foo brand shoes, and I see a shoebox marked with Foo's logo, I want to be reasonably sure that it actually contains Foo-approved shoes. Sure, people try to abuse trademarks ("you're not allowed to use our name in a news article criticizing us!" and other jackassery), but the actual concept of trademarks is great. This is the kind of IP law enforcement I actually want to see.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I came here to say, "Well, I guess the Ivanka shit is gone."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
doesn't deserve "saftey"
But all the fake brand-name products come from Chinese websites and some very big Chinese companies. EU talks a lot but does very little and I think they would need Big Brother U.S. to speak up for them. And what with the European Union getting smaller every year the small turd Brussels, will have to do make with threatening themselves. And I think Italy is on its way to bankruptcy owing the US: €34.8 bn FRANCE: €309 bn SPAIN: €29.5 bn JAPAN: €32.8 bn GERMANY: €120 bn and the UK: €54.7 bn. Foreign debt per person €32,875. Foreign debt: €2 tn.
I posted in a recent comment about abolishing intellectual property. Misrepresentation of the origin of a good does not need trademark to have a special protection in order to be illegal.
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.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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 Craigslist cheap rental ads, they show pictures of fabulous places, they respond only with "sign up here" messages, and the original room is never actually on the Roomster websites. If you subscribe, they say "first month only $10" but instead charge the full $30 to your credit card, they ignore cancellation requests, and if you're not hitting their website often enough they pull an "Ashley Madison". They have a bot pretending to be a landlord reach out to you about a non-existent room, just to dangle the hope of getting a cheap room.
Frankly, most wholesale web fraud can be tracked to a surprisingly small number of bad vendors. I'm delighted to see action taken against them, but this kind of "we cancel the account" action costs them almost nothing. And a modest culling of the most stupid of them is actually good for the rest of them, just as culling most spam made the remaining, more clever spam more effective.
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.
It's not surprising at all when you look at the whole story. The things you thought would shut Trump down, Hillary did much worse. She made Trump look like a goodie two shoes. Unfortunately, no 'real' news sources would report it, so half of America doesn't even know what happened. The funny part is that part of what she was caught doing was telling CNN what and how to report stories, and now while people are still figuring out what happened, someone's trying to shut down 'fake' news outlets. Ironic
"Trump roped a lot of inferior politicians together and dragged them all under. It's a remarkable achievement."
Why act surprised? This is the Republican Method.
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.
How to spot a fake website: Look for the letters "swf" in place of "html", or "file://" in place of "http://".
At least the headline got it right. "Fake brands" is not the same as fake products or fake websites. A cheap Chinese watch is not a fake watch just because it has the work "Rolex". It's a fake Rolex, but it still tells the time as well as you would expect from a cheap Chinese watch.
Unexpected? Only if you were inside the echo chamber.
I was expecting Trump to win for weeks before the election. When you have democrats saying they dislike Hillary so much that they are ready to vote Trump, and republicans telling they dislike Trump so much they are ready to vote Bernie, it becomes pretty clear that all the democrats had to do to lose the election was to select Hillary as their candidate.