Clothing Trade Group: Amazon’s France, India Sites Rampant With Counterfeiting

The American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA) recently wrote a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) asking it to add Amazon’s France and India sites to a list of “Notorious Markets” known for counterfeiting goods, according to CNBC.

AAFA, a clothing trade group representing over 1,000 brands, also previously asked for the USTR to add the U.K., Germany and Canada to the list.

“Despite its role as a leader in the worldwide retail landscape, and as an important selling partner for many of our member brands, Amazon continues to present significant counterfeit challenges,” the letter said. “Thus, we felt it was necessary to again ask USTR to list Amazon.”

Amazon said it was “committed to eliminating counterfeits from its store,” and that it had programs to help fight counterfeiting, including a Brand Registry to help spot fakes and a Project Zero initiative to use artificial intelligence to spot and remove counterfeit items.

AAFA said it wasn’t enough.

“Engagement only goes so far — Amazon needs to go further, by demonstrating the commitment to the resources and leadership necessary to make their brand protection programs scalable, transparent, and most importantly, effective,” the group said.

Amazon said it took the issue very seriously.

“Amazon strictly prohibits the sale of counterfeit products,” the eCommerce giant said. “We invest heavily in prevention and take proactive steps to drive counterfeits in our stores to zero. In 2018 alone, we invested over $400 million in personnel and tools built on machine learning and data science to protect our customers from fraud and abuse in our stores.”

The company said that its counterfeit spotting technology begins to work from the second a third-party vendor registers an account.

“In 2018, we stopped over a million suspected bad actors from opening Amazon selling accounts before they published a single listing for sale, and we blocked more than 3 billion suspected bad listings before they were published to our stores,” Amazon said.