Amazon against the 19 billion euros fakes market

FLORENCE, ITALY – Counterfeiting means 19 billion euros of unrealized sales in the EU over the last year due to fakes and imitations. This illegal activity costs over 2.2 billion only in Italy. The most affected sectors are clothing, shoes, leather goods, beauty products, medicines, fine wines and toys. Counterfeiting is now spread also online.

For this reason, Amazon has established an Internal Anti-Counterfeiting Unit, a global team, with groups operating on a regional basis. Its purpose is gathering evidence, interacting with local law enforcement authorities and conducting independent investigations even with other brands.

Since a year, Amazon has been collaborating with some companies against fakes and recently produced the Amazon Brand Protection Report, a study to protect customers, brands and partners from fraud and fakes.

Amazon has also filed joint lawsuits against fakes with some big Italian fashion houses as Valentino and the Florence based Salvatore Ferragamo.

In 2020, Amazon invested more than $ 700 million to protect its site from fakes and employed more than 10,000 people to protect its “storefronts” from fraud and abuse.

Over 2 million products were remove before sale and destroyed to prevent them from being re-marketed. 10 billion suspicious ads were blocked in 2020 and 6 million attempts to create fake sales accounts on the marketplace were interrupted.

The black market for Made in Italy fashion products is an unsolved problem, causing to the Italian manufacturing companies damages for lost sales and also damages for the consumers, that presume to buy authentic products.