Imitation Nation

In this episode, we cover:

• The Korean Customs Service did a special inspection surge of counterfeit products leading up to America’s Black Friday and China’s Double 11 shopping days. Along with seizing over 600,000 counterfeit items, they did materials analysis on 250 of them, including jewelry that had heavy metals at over 5,000 times the limits for safety. They also found fake Labubu dolls with phthalates, which are carcinogens, at over 300 times the maximum level considered safe.
• Europol has published its new report titled Cheating the Toy World: Operation LUDUS (2020–2025), and the findings are shocking. Over the course of five years, law enforcement across Europe seized nearly 50 million counterfeit and potentially dangerous toys, worth roughly €150 million, during coordinated raids.  Many of those fake toys — from dolls to building bricks and board games — failed basic safety standards, carrying risks like choking, burns, exposure to toxic chemicals, or use of faulty batteries.  Europol says the operation exposes how criminal networks exploit e-commerce, social-media sales, and global shipping to flood markets with unsafe toys — a stark warning for parents and shoppers this festive season.  
• UK Customs Border Force has published a border seizure report for the three years 2021 through 2023, the first report since the UK’s departure from the EU. They said that during that time, they seized over 3 million articles, 95% of which were confirmed counterfeit in 2021 and 89% in 2023. The confirmed counterfeits were all destroyed. In 2023 alone, they seized over 200 million pounds worth of fakes. The trend, they said, is for criminals to ship fewer fakes, but of a higher value. China, Hong Kong, and Turkey are the leading sources of these, in that order. Fake clothing is a consistent highest category of fakes.
• A startup from Fibarcode at University of Michigan has developed a clever new way to weave barcodes directly into fabrics — using invisible photonic fibers that only reveal their unique code under specific wavelengths of light. Backed by a roughly US $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the technology aims to tackle a huge problem: right now, less than 15% of the 92 million tonnes of clothing and textiles thrown away each year are recycled — largely because labels wear out or get cut off. By embedding a permanent, hard-to-forge “barcode” into fabric itself — invisible until scanned — Fibarcode hopes to make garments easier to sort, recycle, authenticate, and track. 
• Authorities in Canada are warning about potentially lethal fakes of HVAC coolant. The fake coolant, which contains lethal methyl chloride, is extremely flammable and corrosive. It can react with aluminum in the HVAC system and ignite spontaneously on contact with air. Brief exposure through inhalation can have severe health effects. If you are in the HVAC business and buy coolants like R410A and R134a, please read our alert. In a separate warning from German manufacturer Copeland, they warned about a counterfeit compressor they obtained from a customer who thought they were buying a genuine product. Counterfeit HVAC equipment has also been reported by manufacturers such as Bitzer and Danfoss.
• The DEA announced that in Los Angeles, in October, they seized over one million counterfeit pills made with fentanyl. This is part of a DEA surge around the country in multiple cities. Along with the pills, the LA operation also seized 70 kilograms of fentanyl powder, almost a thousand kilograms of methamphetamine, 149 kilograms of cocaine, three pill presses, 15 firearms, and 28 million dollars of cash. The operation is named Operation Fentanyl Free America.
• Counterfeit money news this week includes incidents in downtown Howell, Michigan. A bakery and a sandwich shop both got a fake hundred, which they didn’t catch until they took it to the bank. The sandwich shop said they specifically used a counterfeit-detecting marker on the hundred, and it passed, so they accepted it.  The customer apparently ordered something small off the menu, got their change, and left without picking up their order.
• And in Joliet Illinois, a police officer was caught using a fake $100 to buy lottery tickets. In  London, Ontario, Canada, local police warned about fake Canadian $50’s in circulation.