Counterfeit Watchers Discussion Forum

Being quite the avid fan of Omega watches I do a lot of surfing for pics and I look at sites like Ebay quite a lot for a bargain. I've seen the bait but never bitten.

In any event I was shocked at the ammount of counterfeit items for sale and within a few weeks I'd identified over a hundred SEPERATE counterfeit sellers running over a THOUSAND seperate international auctions. Most of which had the use of the word 'replica' or 'fake' and some other more duplicitous people who showed a fake purporting to be real.

Deciding a little action was needed I make some enquiries and with a little help was able to set up a join Police & Trading Standards monitoring group for the net. We would contact the sellers of these goods, identify ourselves and suggest they might wish to withdraw their auctions. We also contacted buyers on counterfeit auctions where a purchase had been made to alert them to our findings. In extreme cases where a large ammount of money was at stake we would intervene and gazump the auction to prevent the crime.

Deciding that three of us were vastly outnumbered and overworked I contacted their law enforcement liason in their Trust & Safety Dept at Ebay UK. I explained what we were doing, I verified our group's identity as law enforcement officials and I asked for help in the detection and prevention of criminal offences against their customers. The response I got was just shocking.

Ebay's facility to alert them to a counterfeit item for sale is dire because you can only direct them, via their own site, to an auction. No method exists to tell them why this is a fake. So while £50 replicas get weeded out, the £3000 Rolex Daytona counterfeit which is described as real stays in. Clearly this was unacceptable to us and I mentioned that some form of direct contact was needed with his organisation to alert them to these high stakes auctions and facilitate their removal. While this was ongoing my group were alerting Ebay to upward of 50-60 auctions PER DAY concerning the sale of counterfeit goods. Approximately 50% of these auctions were allowed to continue. We identified approximately 30 regular 'hard core' sellers who sold in bulk on Ebay and on other sites and concentrated efforts to remove the selling power of these individuals by removing the means, ie their Ebay accounts. Evidence was provided to Ebay in the form of COUNTLESS infringing and illegal auctions. To this date NONE of these people have had their accounts suspended, none of these people have had their selling privelleges removed by Ebay. Instead of concentrating on the fact that major fraud was ongoing each and every day, Ebay's only interest and agenda when dealing with me and my group was to prevent us from interfering in auctions and to protect the extent to which the 'rot had set in' from being exposed. My group were given no direct and consistent form of alert and conact in spite of being Police officers pro-actively investigating potentially serious crimes. My group were given no support in removing the sales means of these criminals. My group were repeatedly harranged for making contact with sellers and effectively threatening them with prosecution (which I think is fair enough really under the circumstances). We were harranged for contacting buyers to warm them that they were about to buy counterfeit goods and we were told in no uncertain terms not to intervene in their auctions to prevent crime. After a short while we were told in no-uncertain terms not to contact their members. Clearly this was not something we found acceptable and continued in the fashion we had previously deemed suitable. However in all my dealings with Ebay I found them unhelpfull, obstructive almost bordering on assisting in the comission of crime and unwilling to protct their customers.

My only saving came in dealing with Rolex, Breitling and Omega who were more than willing to take the details of sellers as we obtained them and prosecute in the civil courts, which became our main function in the end. we find the criminals and allow the civilly infringed to ake civil action (which is often more effective than criminal prosecution in any event). These companies were more than willing to open a forum for us and help, I was sad to tell them we had to shut our group down having found only four verified, checked and cleared genuine regular sellers in the UK (if you're in the UK and you want to know who these are I am happy to tell you).

Now I stress these are my own findings and my own opinions based on my experiences but they paint a very worrying picture.

My colleagues and I found our workload unmanageable after a while and have since had to relinquish these duties in favour of an increased mainstream workload but for me as a watch lover, if you like, it was a hell of an eye opener.

Ebay seems to nice and colourfull, so inviting so nice. Yet behind these pleasant images hide serious and organised criminals who have no better intention than to take £5000 from you and send you a cheap Chinese Rolex copy, or Omega copy or Breitling copy or indeed whatever you like. You know what else? If you spend £5000 on a fake rolex sold to you as real Ebay don't care. Ebay have done nothing about it and the news I hear about trademark owners suing Ebay for allowing and assisting in the breaches of their trademark is GREAT news. It can only help make this online community safer.

My advice to you all is to steer well clear of Ebay. It's a dangerous place with plenty of villains happy to take your money. Where will ebay be? Hiding behind their automated customer service email system of course. They don't care. They got their money, the seller gave it to them.

Pete J