Why 15 Million Fakes Is the Wrong Number to Watch
2 October 2026
by Alan Chester – Chief Customer Officer
Each year Amazon publishes its numbers on counterfeits, and this year’s headline was a big one. In its first Trustworthy Shopping Experience Report, Amazon said it detected more than 15 million counterfeit products worldwide in 2025. It says its proactive controls block more than 99% of suspected infringing listings before a brand has to report them.
That’s a serious effort and I don’t want to dismiss it. But when I look at where the brands we work with actually lose money, the fake sitting in an Amazon warehouse is rarely the main problem anymore. The fraud has moved: to the listing itself, to the third-party sellers around it, and to every other marketplace a brand trades on.
Start with how fakes now travel. The OECD and EUIPO’s latest study found that in 2020–21, shipments containing fewer than ten items made up 79% of all counterfeit customs seizures, up from 61% in 2017–19. Counterfeiters have swapped containers for parcels, sent straight to consumers who bought them from third-party sellers on marketplaces. Generative AI has made it cheaper still: cloning a brand’s listing images, product copy and reviews is now an afternoon’s work.
Then there are the losses that never look like fraud on a dashboard. In client work, the damage that hurts most is usually quieter: a hijacked listing where a third party swaps your images or attaches an inferior product, grey-market stock undercutting your price, or an unauthorised reseller winning the Buy Box and triggering price-matching across the board. What you see is a drop in conversion or a squeezed margin, not a counterfeit. Premium brands feel this most, because the price gap is exactly what makes them worth targeting.
Amazon ending FBA commingling on 31 March this year is a good example of where things are heading. Identical stock from different sellers is no longer pooled under the manufacturer barcode, and resellers now need Amazon’s own barcodes on their units. That closes one of the long-standing routes for a fake or poor-condition unit to reach a customer through a genuine listing. But it also hands responsibility back to the brand: the protections only work if you are set up as the recognised brand owner, with your registry and barcodes in order.
That responsibility multiplies as brands scale. A brand that is well protected on Amazon UK can be wide open on Amazon.de, a regional marketplace or TikTok Shop: no local trademark, no brand registry, nobody reading local-language listings. Bad actors know which brands are expanding, and they often get there first.
The brands that cope best don’t treat any of this as a legal problem to be handled after the fact. They register trademarks and brand registries before they launch in a market, not after the first issue. They control their distribution, so they know exactly who should be selling their products and where. And they use the tools already available to them. Amazon’s Project Zero, for example, lets brands remove counterfeit listings themselves, but to qualify you need a track record of accurate reporting, with at least a 90% acceptance rate on reports in the last six months. For many brands, the step that can make a difference is bringing in a specialist. Our partner POTOO Solutions monitors listings across marketplaces, maps authorised against unauthorised sellers and tracks pricing, then works alongside the brand to enforce against violations.
What we typically experience is the advertising, pricing and content teams usually spot a problem long before anyone in legal does: a listing that stops converting, a seller that appears overnight, a price that drops for no reason. If those signals reach the right people quickly, most issues can be fixed in hours rather than months.
Amazon will keep publishing bigger numbers, and that’s a good thing. But the number that matters to a brand is the one on its own P&L.
The brands that scale most successfully across marketplaces treat protection as part of their channel strategy from day one.
At Luzern, that is how we approach it: protecting the brand is what makes profitable growth possible.