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| Police with seized counterfeit goods |
The seizure of dozens of websites selling fake goods announced by federal authorities Thursday is the latest proof that online counterfeiters are employing ever more sophisticated tactics to lead consumers astray.
After a four-month probe called Project Copy Cat, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators shut down 70 sites designed to be mirror-images of real ones.
The fake sites purported to sell items such as official San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders jerseys, Louis Vuitton bags and upscale Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. They used Web addresses like "tiffanyandcojewelrysale.net" that could appear similar to the URLs of the true sites.
The sites even used images of Secure Sockets Layer certificates - often seen as a padlock logo - to trick customers into thinking they were financially secure and verified.
Businesses that trade in ersatz merchandise, from sports apparel to jewelry to DVDs, have long used the Internet to sell their wares. Stopping them has been like playing a game of whack-a-mole, said NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy.
But now counterfeiters are using technology with an increasing level of sophistication, which poses new problems for companies trying to protect their brands and shoppers trying to protect their wallets.
Facebook ads
A social-media marketer who is waging his own campaign to get Facebook to crack down harder on counterfeiters said he's catalogued 7,000 examples of ads for fake products on the social network. One he cited used images of 49ers legends Joe Montana and Jerry Rice to tout a "Cheap jersey, only $18."
"Why am I catching this and they're not?" said Eric Feinberg, creator of the ad hoc Fans AgainstKounterfeit Enterprise, or FAKE. "We're talking about two of the most iconic 49ers of all time getting used. If you want to be a publicly traded company, you have to have oversight, and there's no oversight here."
Feinberg said he did work for sports-related clients who used social media to get people talking about their products. But his work was stymied by Facebook ads that led to counterfeit sites based in China.
Facebook's ads use members' favorite topics, interests and "likes" to push more relevant ads to them. Feinberg said instead of finding a fake site by searching through Google, "This is searching me."
Masquerading as 'real deal'
The copycat trend is "alarming," said John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an investigative unit of the Department of Homeland Security.
"The fake sites and the real sites are almost indistinguishable," he said. "And the fake sites aren't offering obvious knockoffs. They are trying to masquerade as the real deal."
Sites that offered fake Major League Baseball merchandise were so realistic that a buyer would have to be familiar with a team's current roster of players to know they weren't real, he said.
The copycat sites didn't have abnormally low prices, one of the usual tell-tale signs. Instead, they offered goods or services that were "close to or near the legitimate prices," which would also give counterfeiters a higher profit margin, Morton said.
The goods ordered by undercover officers were shipped to the United States from other countries, and Morton said most of the fake sites were linked to China. No arrests have been made, although the investigation is continuing.
One step ahead?
Morton said the investigation did not focus on Facebook ads, but that's an area where New York social-media marketer Feinberg believes counterfeiters are already one step ahead of the law.
In January, he set up fake Facebook accounts to bait the counterfeiters and began seeing more ads. Some were comically obvious, like one for a pair of "Oakley 29 $" sunglasses.
And this week, his personal Facebook account received a "friend request" from a member named "Nflcn JerseysShop," which then posted links on his wall to a site in China that offered a variety of sports apparel.
Feinberg contacted Facebook last month to call attention to the sites, but received a letter that said the Menlo Park company could only act if it received a report from the authorized copyright or trademark owner.
"I want to know if Facebook is making revenue off this," Feinberg said.
Ad guidelines
A Facebook spokeswoman said the company acts immediately when notified of a problem ad.
Facebook is also a founding member - along with Google, Twitter, AOL and the Interactive Advertising Bureau - of the Ads Integrity Alliance, a group started last month to share information and develop policies to protect consumers from the kind of "malvertising" that FAKE complains about.
"It's enough of a problem that some of the biggest players in online advertising decided to get together," said Maxim Weinstein, the alliance's leader and president of the nonprofit group StopBadware.
"This would be bad for consumers and the industry if we got to the point where people say I don't trust online ads and I'm not going to click on them anymore," he said.
Content thank you: Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com
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