500,000 Counterfeit Products Sold to eBay Consumers

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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500,000 Counterfeit Products Sold to eBay Consumers

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The Counterfeit Report claims “The eBay counterfeit product listings reflect actual sales of over 500,000 counterfeit items to eBay consumers.” eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) says not.

New research from The Counterfeit Report says that:

The eBay counterfeit product listings reflect actual sales of over 500,000 counterfeit items to eBay consumers. Particularly shocking is the investigation focused on less than a dozen items. Not purses, watches or fakes shoes, but items consumers wouldn’t suspect. The majority were fake – easily identifiable items that don’t exist in the manufacturer’s authentic product line, but bear the manufacturer’s trademark.

The Counterfeit Report purchased and received over 2,000 manufacturer confirmed counterfeit and fake products from eBay sellers. While the eBay sellers usually remain, eBay chose to block The Counterfeit Report’s accounts and test purchases in an effort to end the whistleblower activity. Negative “counterfeit” feedback left by The Counterfeit Report for the counterfeit sellers was removed by eBay.

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An official at eBay writes:

Mr. Crosby (publisher of The Counterfeit Report), who is neither law enforcement nor a rights owner, professes to operate a website to promote counterfeit awareness. But in reality, he is only looking out for his own business interests and his own bottom line. Instead of working collaboratively with eBay to combat counterfeits — as we invited him to do — Mr. Crosby chose to operate outside eBay’s policies and file demonstrably meritless claims and litigation against the company. Recently, Mr. Crosby filed suit against eBay seeking alleged damages, which resulted in an arbitrator ruling in eBay’s favor and awarding fees incurred defending against what the arbitrator ruled were ‘frivolous claims.’

Counterfeits are not welcome on eBay. We’re committed to combatting the sale of counterfeit goods and have consistently been an Internet industry leader in working to stop the online sale of counterfeit goods. We utilize a combination of sophisticated detection tools, enforcement and strong relationships with brand owners, retailers and law enforcement agencies to combat bad activity and present our customers with a safe, trusted shopping experience. In addition, for merchants in particular, eBay proactively partners with retailers and manufacturers to combat the sale of stolen or counterfeit goods

In the rare case a buyer believes that he or she has purchased a counterfeit item, eBay’s Money Back Guarantee applies to virtually all transactions and will cover them accordingly.

Hard to sort out the bodies.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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