Chinese counterfeit goods flood US
Warning: some are dangerous!
China is continuing to flood the US with counterfeit goods in shipments often worth millions of dollars each (like the fake Cartier watches pictured above) that US Customs & Border Protection Officers seized earlier this month as they entered the country through Indianapolis. Had these knock-offs made it to the retail market, they could have been sold for upwards of $4 million.
During the past three years, China has consistently shipped counterfeit brand-name luxury items to the US, largely made up of three types of merchandise:
Jewelry
Watches
Handbags & Wallets
Over the last four years, the CBP reports that its seizures of fake foreign-made goods entering the US have more than doubled. During that time, the real makers of those products have more than quadrupled what we are charged for them to offset those losses.
During the 2024 fiscal year, CBP conducted over 32,000 seizures with an estimated manufacturer’s suggested retail price of over $5.4 billion, had the goods been genuine. Ninety percent of those knock-offs came from China and its "Special Administrative Region" of Hong Kong.
The fake designer watch pictured above was part of a shipment of 305 watches from China worth more than $8.3 million, which was seized earlier this month in Chicago.
The photo below is of bags containing 7,319 counterfeit Van Cleef & Arpels earrings worth more $30 million from Hong Kong that were intercepted by the CBP in Louisville while on their way to Miami.
These Chinese counterfeiters have also targeted US collectors of high-dollar professional sports memorabilia. The "bling ring" pictured below was one of many fake sports jewelry items worth more than $600,000 seized by CBP officers this month in San Francisco.
And as damaging as those fake goods are to their real domestic manufacturers, who own their copyrights (and designed them), as well as the buyers who unknowingly purchase them, some of the knock-offs being smuggled into the country are downright dangerous.
The photo below is of pharmaceuticals counterfeited primarily in Hong Kong and China (and to a lesser extent in Colombia and Korea), which were among 54,843 fake doses Cincinnati CBP Officers intercepted this month from shipments intended to reach Texas and Florida. Georgia, Colorado, California, and New York.
16,740 of the intercepted counterfeit doses consisted of fake Ozempic, Semaglutide, Retatrutide, and Tirzepatide injections in demand for weight loss. The value of all these drugs (which were seized over a weeklong period) is estimated at more than $3.53 million.
Should more be done to keep these dangerous Chinese "knock-offs" from entering the US?
Share your thoughts in the comments to this article.
Abrazos,
Jack Beavers
Jack, I am so grateful to CBP for catching these counterfeit items and drugs. It makes me wonder how many got through customs? Thank you, Jack for keeping us Patriots informed.
Thanks for covering another fringe-but-significant story, indicative of how future trade relations with the CCP might be expected to evolve.
I have no idea if more should be done, because I don't know what they're doing now to monitor counterfeiting. But the pharmaceutical issue is a major problem. It seems like we're going to be forced to rapidly reduce dependency on China, unless the capitalist coalition from Shanghai can oust Xi and his CCP henchmen...things are in flux over there:
https://www.youtube.com/@KenCaoMacroLens
https://www.youtube.com/@LeisRealTalk
People laugh at my reliance on amateur citizen journalists. But the only thing that confers quasi legitimacy on mainstream journalism is a recognizable masthead; and we know how often that's been abused. If citizen journalism had been available to anyone with a phone during the original cold war, we might have anticipated the USSR's sudden collapse.
Or maybe not; geopolitical "experts" still seem to engage in far too much log-rolling. I've heard so many people with impressive bona fides parroting each other's talking points, while failing to monitor street-level action that citizen journos report on. Weirdly, these folks make predictions every week that turn out to be spectacularly wrong, but their fans hardly seem to notice.