On this week’s episode of Imitation Nation, we discuss one of the biggest trade policy shifts in years: the end of De Minimis, which officially expired at midnight through an Executive Order. This sudden end to a decades old policy is sending ripple effects through supply chains, as freight companies, freight forwarders and Post Offices across the globe are temporarily suspending or stopping shipments to the United States.

We explore what this seismic change means for global commerce and we highlight the positive outcomes for brand protection, brand owners, trademark holders and how this will likely provide lasting impacts on counterfeit enforcement. We also discuss the ripple effects across supply chains, and the strategic implications for professionals on the frontlines of IP enforcement.

We also cover the sudden termination of the controversial Type 86 entry pilot program, which has resulted in the exponential growth in small parcel and De Minimis shipments. Beyond the headlines, we look at where counterfeiters may move next and why this shift,

In this episode of Imitation Nation, hosts Shabbir Imber Safdar and Sven Bergmann break down one of the biggest trade shifts of 2025: the imminent and likely permanent end of the de minimis. With more than 1.3 billion packages entering the U.S. last year under this exemption, it’s about to get a lot harder for counterfeit goods to hide in the pile. But what does this change mean for brands, shippers, consumers and law enforcement? We discuss what it is, why it’s ending, how it might make your online shopping a little more expensive and what this means to illicit trade and counterfeit.

We are also covering a plethora of counterfeit stories from across the world in our lighting round, including:

The conviction of a man in Liverpool to 28 months in prison for selling £650,000 in fake postage stamps.

Formula One cracks down on counterfeits at Vegas GP, suing souvenir shops for selling knockoff merch.

Europol seizes a massive shipment of counterfeit currency—$76 million worth of fake dollars, euros, and pounds.

BMW adds new security features to protect auto parts, and Mercedes is stepping up its anti-counterfeit fight too.

U.S. regulators warn about fake Labubu dolls breaking apart and becoming a choking hazard.

Seagate busts a counterfeiting ring in Malaysia that was flipping old hard drives as “new.”

This White House has made big changes to De Minimis: For a look at the scale of packages, check out this CBS News piece. We cover the impact on counterfeit medicines, especially fake fentanyl pills, and techniques that companies might start to use to circumvent tariff uncertainty.

The Trump trademark owners have complained about ecommerce platforms selling counterfeit versions of Trump-branded products and filed litigation.

We also talk about a machine that makes counterfeit pills, the pill press, and a recent report the Partnership for Safe Medicines published about illegal pill presses.

And there’s a lot of shout out stories this week we don’t have time to go into fully:

Counterfeit Labubu toys

$3.5mm seized in Port of Cincinnatti

Fentanyl analogues finally got scheduled after 6 years of work

Brandy Melville sues Temu after suing Shein

Really good looking fake $100’s

Amazon’s counterfeit crimes unit is claiming they’ve secured $180mm in penalties and 65 criminal convictions.

Operation Pangea 17 from Interpol was released. See this fancy graphic.

Sven looked back at the previous 10 years of Operation Pangea and these results are record breaking by any measure.

50.4 million doses of illicit pharmaceuticals worth USD 65 million. The largest operation to date had been $11 million in illicit medicines.

Arrest of 769 suspects and the dismantling of 123 criminal groups worldwide.

In total, law enforcement agencies worldwide launched 1,728 investigations and issued 847 search warrants targeting criminal networks engaged in the illicit distribution of pharmaceutical products. 93 per cent of the illicit pharmaceuticals seized lacked regulatory approvals from national health authorities.

This trend is being driven by the widespread promotion and availability of these medicines across social media and online marketplaces, creating lucrative and relatively low-risk opportunities for criminal networks selling low-quality or counterfeit products.

Lululemon is suing Costco over design patent infringement of several of their clothing products. While you could read the suit yourself, we recommend this video from fashion designer Joe Ng that explains the types of patents you can have, and how trade dress works. Joe Ng says the craftsmanship is not as good on the Costco product.

China is now entering the world of IP protection because their brands are fighting off fakes. China has brands and now Intellectual Property to protect! Phones by Huawei, Drones by DJI, My favorite portable batteries from Anker, and New electric cars from BYD.

According to the OECD, China remains the source of most counterfeits in the world, so this could be a very topsy turvy time. Our bottom line is that there’s never bad news in adding a new ally country to the world of brand protection.

Quick news hits:

9 great documentaries on counterfeits and illegal trade from Factual America

Issues in the fake wine world in Bill Koch’s cellar

Chinese controlled counterfeit gang busted.

Tom’s hardware review ran an article this week about a chinese pc repair shop that received four of these, and upon closer examination, three of them were fake and unrepairable and unusable. They had modified older cards and in some cases attached other parts to give the appearance of the 4090 unit but the fake one was still inoperable which you would have discovered the moment you plugged it in.

StockX has reported it rejected nearly $10 million worth of counterfeit sneakers last year as part of a comprehensive report outlining its efforts on verification, fraud prevention and anti-counterfeiting in 2024. The resale platform's "Brand Protection and Consumer Trust" report consists of 19 pages detailing the measures it takes to ensure it delivers authentic product to consumers. Over the course of 2024, StockX rejected more than 30,000 sneakers alone suspected of being counterfeit. Suspected fakes are the second most common reason for products being rejected, accounting for 22 percent of total products rejected. 32 percent of items were rejected for defects, while 12 percent were found to be used and another 7 percent came in a damaged box.

We are following this new case of Audi AG v. CarParts.com, Inc., 1:25-cv-04940 (S.D.N.Y.), in which Audi asserts that CarParts.com is selling copies of their goods using their trademarks, including proprietary OEM numbers. We think it’s also interesting that the EU Court of Justice also found that selling grills without the Audi logo, but that have a cutout that fits the logo, is also trademark infringement.

Quick news hits:

Another fake money scheme in Florida, where four men obtained $100 fake bills made by bleaching $10 bills and printing the $100 bill over the same material. You could still see Hamilton’s face in the watermark, which tipped off a grocery cashier.

Labubu dolls are a hot item, which means counterfeits are being made and China just shut down a factory making them. As a response the other factories making fakes appear to have shut down operations and gone dark to avoid getting caught.

Back on the fake stamps beat, the US Postal Service filed and obtained a temporary restraining order against two shipping companies New York and Los Angeles who are accused of using fake USPS shipping labels to ship merchandise for Chinese customers through the US Postal service…for years.

PSM did a video story on the Heal The World civil suit from Gilead Sciences, accusing the pharmacy in NYC of trafficking in counterfeit HIV medicine.

We discuss the massive four-continent bust that Europol coordinated of dark web sellers of counterfeit controlled substances as part of Operation RapTor.

We also discuss CBP’s enormous seizure of counterfeit Apple chargers. We think it must have been an entire container’s worth of fake chargers, given descriptions of the quantity.

There was a bust in Michigan of someone holding $100,000 of counterfeit currency. From the slightly low res photo, it looks like it was $100 bills. The tip from it came when the accused criminal bought a drone from someone for $800 using the fake currency, and when the seller realized the money was fake he reported it. But there are also stories in the news about fake currency in Canada, India, Arkansas, and Georgia. The canadian fake is actually not a bill, but a fake two dollar coin.

A new portable device detects counterfeit Viagra in seconds. No special training is required to operate the device developed by researchers at the University of Lausanne, and the drug does not need to be destroyed for analysis. The device is shaped like a pen. The pen is used to scan the surface of tablets. The data is analyzed using artificial intelligence. This enables the device to determine with 100 percent accuracy whether it is an original preparation or a counterfeit.

PSM released a report this week on fishy freight shipments of medicine into the country, using data we pulled from the FDA’s medical freight shipments database. We are finding two kinds of fraud here. First, we’re seeing shipping manifests where the manufacturer listed on the report is not an FDA-registered entity, which means it’s been made in a facility never inspected by the FDA. Which means it’s illegal to enter the country.

Second is that we’re seeing people misdeclare the product code on an item to evade interdiction.  We found two Schedule 1 controlled substances, mescaline and LSD, coded as anti-depressants and antibiotics. The codes said antidepressant, but the description in text said LSD.  I’m guessing they just have machine scanning of codes and are not even looking at the text.

We’re seeing a lot of really weird things springing up around the trade war and what Shabbir is seeing in online discussions is wild, like customs agents talking about a spike in country of origin fraud combined with transhipping. Sven is noticing that there’s a big spike in demand for bonded warehouses, so people managing cross border inventory have a place to stage goods until there’s a break in tariffs. [Story1, Story2]

The end of de minimis started on Friday May 2nd. That affects 1.36bn packages that enter the country every year. This change will affect both consumers that buy cheap products from China but also businesses in the U.S. that source their products or parts from China. We’re expecting a rise in the technique of trans-shipping to evade the end of Chinese de minimis packages.

The US Trade Representative released the 2025 “Special 301 Report” on Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement. There are eight countries on the Priority Watch List: Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Venezuela, and eighteen on the Watch list: Algeria, Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Türkiye, and Vietnam.

Issues with countries cited in the report include poor enforcement of local counterfeit manufacturing, piracy of intellectual property, bad faith trademark enforcement, and poor enforcement of trade secrets, copyright law, and patent infringement.

We’re also tracking this dispute, which is both a federal criminal case and a state attorney general case over where body armor plates, designed to protect law enforcement were made. The vendor in question is accused of using Chinese-made products and claiming they were made in the U.S. The DOJ also stated that these body armor plates failed testing, which is a catastrophic consequence for something like body armor. According to the DOJ, Customs and Border Protection detected these packages during an inspection inside a larger freight shipment in a truck crossing the border from Canada to the U.S.

AI being used to do fraud at scale, including a report from Europol, and a report from Food and Beverage Magazine. Also, AI is being used to generate patent applications, which is probably going to bury a lesser-staffed USPTO.

Shabbir talked about the Amazon Brand Protection Report, which makes him want legislation to ensure all marketplaces work hard to avoid counterfeit products. Shein’s troubles trying (or not trying) to rid their platform of counterfeit Coach bags is worth a listen.

Finally we talk about the same problems in Europe, where it’s estimated that 85% of products from low cost online platforms are counterfeit, and their de minimis problem is three times as big as the United States at 4.6bn packages a year.

Sven would like you to take a moment and appreciate the Plagarius Awards, given to best counterfeit products found online each year.

In this episode, Shabbir and Sven talk about…

Counterfeit forever stamps. Shabbir bought stamps that are too cheap to be true and is sending three letters to Sven, two with fake stamps and one with a real one, to see if they arrive. Remember, the US Postal Inspectors would like you to report fake stamps here: https://www.uspis.gov/report

Counterfeit airbags. We discuss Michigan’s one-of-a-kind auto fraud task force, and their work to fight counterfeit air bags and other fake auto parts. Learn more here: https://www.autobodynews.com/news/michigan-man-charged-with-selling-counterfeit-airbags

More disturbingly is the fact that there may be 81,000 fake air bags floating around in cars: https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/04/michigan-man-allegedly-sold-counterfeit-air-bags-81k-vehicles-may...