Behind the scenes with the team of ex-prosecutors fighting Amazon’s counterfeit problem
Counterfeits on Amazon skyrocketed after sales from Chinese-based sellers more than doubled in 2015. Here's how Amazon is trying to stop the problem.
In 2018, police showed up at a nondescript industrial warehouse in New York's Brooklyn Navy Yard to investigate reported counterfeits.
Federal agents were looking for knockoff military gear as part of an investigation into a distributor, called California Surplus, that had secured a $20 million contract to supply the U.S. military with specialized uniforms. They'd already recovered thousands of boxes of the stuff from a nearby New Jersey warehouse, according to court documents.
California Surplus, it turned out, was selling Chinese-made counterfeit goods designed to look like gear from one of the top military outfitters in America, Crye Precision. Crye's Brooklyn headquarters happened to be located just around the block.
The owner of California Surplus, Ramin Kohanbash, and co-conspirator Bernard Klein pleaded guilty in 2019 to trafficking counterfeit goods and were given jail time.
Counterfeiting has ballooned into a massive problem for Crye, costing it millions of dollars a year, said Jonathan Antone, the company's general counsel. Crye loses out on valuable sales to unlicensed mills overseas that print copies of its patented camouflage, called MultiCam, on ponchos, pants, shirts and hats that sell on Amazon and other marketplaces without Crye's permission.
Article