Inside Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit, the team hunting fakes across its marketplace

That team, the Counterfeit Crimes Unit, now pursues such fraudsters across the world, partnering with brands and law enforcement to “go after these bad actors at scale.” The group sits inside Amazon’s broader brand-protection teams, a global operation that the company says involves thousands of workers and more than $1 billion in annual investments.

Amazon has introduced tools like Project Zero, Brand Registry and Transparency, which let brands remove infringing listings themselves or authenticate products through unique serialization codes. Amazon also routinely highlights its automated systems for catching suspicious listings before they go live, Smith told Modern Retail. The CCU is the small, highly specialized force that handles the cases requiring human investigation, which can lead to lawsuits, raids or criminal referrals.

“Our mission is to disrupt and dismantle counterfeiters all over the globe, if there is any nexus or connection to the Amazon store,” Smith said.

Smith joined Amazon as an “OG member” of the CCU, he said, helping stand up the division as it sought to take a more aggressive stance against counterfeiters as the size of Amazon’s third-party marketplace has grown. Amazon opened up its e-commerce site to independent, third-party sellers in 2000, allowing them to hawk their wares on the company’s sprawling web store. Today, millions of third-party sellers account for more than 60% of Amazon’s $75 billion in annual retail sales.

Amazon’s marketplace drives around 40% of the company’s total revenue, but like most third-party marketplaces, it has also faced a number of issues related to counterfeit products. For brands, counterfeit goods can be costly, cutting into sales and tarnishing a brand’s reputation if the fakes are low-quality or defective.

Since its launch, the CCU has advanced more than 24,000 investigations through lawsuits and criminal referrals, filed more than 200 civil actions and helped hold 65 bad actors accountable in courts, according to Smith. Since 2020, there has been approximately a 35% decrease in total valid notices of infringement submitted by brands, despite significant growth in the number of products available for sale. In 2024 alone, in partnership with Amazon’s brand-protection teams, the company also identified, seized and disposed of more than 15 million counterfeit products.

Amazon says its reach allows it to push cases deeper into the counterfeit supply chain than most brands could on their own. When a rights holder flags suspicious items through a notice of infringement — known internally as an NOI — Amazon’s product-quality and controls-deployment teams quarantine inventory and block further sales. The CCU also shares evidence of suspected fraudsters to law enforcement officials.

“We can share data such as IP addresses, financial information and physical addresses,” Smith said. “We heard from law enforcement that when we do things like this and share in real time, it’s helped them move six months faster in their investigation.”

The CCU regularly teams up with brands like Pandora, Canon and Prada to sue sellers of counterfeit goods. Last week, Amazon announced that it had filed a joint lawsuit with the cosmetics company L’Oréal USA, alleging that the defendants illegally marketed and sold counterfeit CeraVe-branded skin-care products on Amazon’s platform. The retailer blocked the selling accounts and issued refunds to customers after L’Oréal verified that the products were counterfeit, according to the announcement.

Amazon also said it led an investigation with Nintendo that helped stop a counterfeiting ring in Long Island, New York that operated fraudulent Amazon seller accounts and sold knockoff Nintendo products, including Nintendo Switch docking stations, adapters and Pokémon Go Plus+ accessories. The companies shared their evidence with law enforcement, which raided facilities in Long Island, leading to the seizure of counterfeit products and the arrest of two individuals.

The division’s work isn’t just limited to big brands; the CCU also works with smaller and independently owned brands. For example, in 2021, Amazon filed multiple federal lawsuits on behalf of family-owned card game maker Dutch Blitz. The lawsuits alleged that the defendants used Dutch Blitz’s trademarks without authorization to sell counterfeit versions of the game on Amazon. In 2020, Amazon also filed a joint lawsuit with J.L. Childress against counterfeitters knocking off the brand’s travel bags, car seats and strollers.

The sale of counterfeits on Amazon has strained its relationships with some brands. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson temporarily pulled many of its consumer products from Amazon, arguing the retailer wasn’t doing enough to curb third-party sales of damaged or expired goods. In May, Amazon resumed working with Nike to source products directly, ending years of separation after Nike pulled out in 2019 because of counterfeits.

Amazon has a “vested interest” in cracking down on counterfeit goods as it tries to attract more big-name brands to its marketplace, said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis. Counterfeits are “impossible to fully prevent,” he added, because marketplaces like Amazon list millions of items, making the sheer volume difficult to police. Even so, Amazon has taken steps to rebuild trust with major brands by tightening controls around who is allowed to sell specific products on its platform.

For example, in September, Amazon announced at its annual seller conference that it was shutting down its long-running “commingling” program, a controversial practice in which Amazon pooled identical items from different sellers under one barcode. The system, intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space, had also allowed counterfeit or expired goods to be mixed in with authentic ones.

In addition to working with law enforcement and brands directly, Amazon’s CCU uses artificial intelligence at a massive scale to monitor the storefront. The company leverages AI to run “billions of scans per day” to spot suspicious behavior, a system that helps it “stop at least 99% of fraudulent listings before a brand brings it to our attention,” Smith said.

But counterfeiters are adopting generative AI, too. Smith wouldn’t describe specific methods for security reasons, but he said the activity is increasing. Bad actors are using AI and large language models to commit fraud, including reviews abuse, where fraudsters attempt to have people submit fake and fictitious reviews to promote products. Modern Retail previously reported that counterfeiters are already using AI tools to manipulate product photos and videos to evade detection, including swapping in AI-generated faces or subtly altering brand imagery.

Saleem Alhabash, a professor and researcher at Michigan State University’s Center for Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection, said artificial intelligence has become both “a large problem and a huge opportunity” in the fight against fakes. While brands and law enforcement are increasingly using AI to scan listings for authenticity, he said that the same tools are making it easier for bad actors to evade detection. “Bad actors are using those technologies to make the product listing sound better and even look better,” he said, adding that generative tools can now mimic the tone and aesthetic of real brands.

“We are seeing bad actors attempting to use AI and different large language models to commit fraud,” Smith said. “We’re looking for that, we’re prepared for that.”