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Amazon Admits to Counterfeit Problem

posted by martyb on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the fakes-news dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/amazon-10k-warns-investors-about-counterfeit-problem-for-first-time.html

After years of denial and stonewalling, Amazon has admitted for the first time that they have a problem with counterfeit products. This primarily affects the Amazon Marketplace.

As a personal victim of getting counterfeit goods several times from Amazon (and eBay), I thought I'd help spread the word a bit farther. Apparently counterfeit board games is a big thing.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @06:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @06:47PM (#801097)

    Counterfeit board games, as in counterfeit copies of games like Splendor and Ticket to Ride. If you really want to know you can search online, but the short summary...

    People (especially China, but in general) create counterfeit products, including board games. There are numerous ways, but they including photocopying cards and printing them on lower quality, taking 3d scans of plastic miniatures and creating injection molds off of them, and all the standard ways of counterfeiting. They will create lower-cost-to-manufacture (including possibly toxic materials, who knows as there is no oversight or reputation risk), and then sell them cheap. They get extra money because they don't pay the actual copyright owners any money.

    This is a problem for multiple reasons.
    1) The creators of the product don't get paid for their work. Moreover, they are subject to reputation damage ("People say good things about Days of Wonder, but when I tried it myself, it felt really cheap.")
    2) It also damages the industry, in that people who would potentially be interested get turned off by low quality product, as per number 3 below.
    3) The overall product is inferior. Cards are thinner making them harder to shuffle and subject to warping. Boards don't lay flat. Plastic models are some 10% smaller (due to how they need to make copy injection molds). Inlays don't hold the components correctly and tear. Actual mistakes in the counterfeit copy making some cards mis-marked and the game actually unplayable.

    Typically the errors are small enough that unless you really know games you won't actively notice them (could you really tell a fake Rolex from a real one?), but there is a noticeable quality degradation that you will emotionally feel. It just doesn't "feel good" to hold the cards, for example. And that's ignoring the safety issue (e.g. paint made from lead is cheaper), and the moral issue.