TL;DR
On 22 October the EUIPO and the European Commission published their joint report on intellectual property enforcement in 2025. Over 196 million counterfeit articles were detained at the EU border and inside the EU internal market, with an estimated retail value of EUR 6.3 billion. That is more than 67% above 2024 and a new record. Six weeks earlier, on 8 September, the UK Intellectual Property Office published its annual survey of Trading Standards, answered by 142 of the 189 local authorities that enforce IP crime on the ground.
Most coverage stopped at the record. Read from the desk of a brand protection manager, the most useful lines are further down, where the reports describe what rights holders did, what investigators found and where the officers were looking.
The 2025 figures are heavily concentrated. Italy accounted for 80.21% of the articles detained in the EU internal market and 73.93% of their value. Across border and internal market combined, over 90% of the volume and the value was detained in four Member States. At the border, the number of detained articles rose 114% to 42.1 million, which the report attributes mainly to "an exceptional detention of 16 million items of Other tobacco products."
The report also puts the border figure in proportion. The value of counterfeit goods traded into the EU was estimated at EUR 99 billion in 2021, and the value detained at the border represented some 0.43% of that estimate.
None of this makes the numbers wrong. It means they measure enforcement activity: where authorities searched, and how large individual hauls were. A brand cannot read its own exposure off the EU total. Its own customs notifications, investigator reports and test purchases say much more about where its counterfeits come from, provided someone reads them side by side.
When customs detains goods under Regulation (EU) No 608/2013, the brand that filed the application for action has to answer. Under Article 23, the right holder has 10 working days from notification (three working days for perishable goods) to confirm in writing that an IP right has been infringed and to agree to destruction. If customs receives neither, and has not been told that court proceedings have started, it releases the goods.
The 2025 report records how those procedures ended. In 84.69% of them the goods were destroyed, through the standard or the small consignment procedure, and 7.63% went into national criminal proceedings. In 5.51%, "no action was taken by the right holder."
The report does not say why. Some of those cases will be deliberate choices about low-value parcels. Others may be notifications that reached the wrong person, or arrived when the team was busy, and ran out of time. In the statistics, a decision and a missed deadline look exactly the same. Only the brand's own records can tell them apart.
The IP Enforcement Portal (IPEP) is the EU channel rights holders use to alert police and market surveillance authorities. In 2025 rights holders sent 1,305 alerts through it, down from 1,981 in 2024 and 1,865 in 2023. The report offers possible reasons: "the availability of alternative official communication tools, certain operational and technical constraints and third-country access restrictions as well as varying levels of familiarity among users."
So the drop does not prove brands are talking to enforcers less. Some of that traffic has probably moved to other channels. What has clearly changed is the kind of case the enforcers describe. In the UK survey, the share of Trading Standards authorities that saw links between IP crime and organised crime groups rose from 48% to 64% in a year. Links to serious organised crime groups rose from 18% to 29%, and to money laundering from 36% to 41%.
An officer working on an organised group gets little from an alert about one listing. An alert that ties the listing to an address, a shipment or a payment account the officer can check is a different matter. Whatever channel the brand uses, the work that decides whether an alert is useful happens on the brand's side before it is sent.
The sharpest change in the EU report is in one product category. Labels, tags and stickers went from 2.11% of the articles detained in the internal market in 2024 to 13.41% in 2025. The report calls them "assembling materials with a clear potential effect to multiply counterfeits within the EU." At the border, labels, tags and stickers ranked first and packaging materials third among articles detained in express courier and postal consignments. The report reads this as "suggesting production/assembly in the EU."
For the person reading detention notices, this changes what deserves follow-up. A parcel of twenty finished bags is one sale stopped. A parcel of a few thousand labels points to the place where they were going to be sewn on, and to whoever receives the next parcel. A notice like that should go to an investigator with a specific question: where was this consignment going, and what else has been delivered there?
The UK survey describes what those sites can look like. Self storage facilities featured in 19% of authorities' investigations, and the survey cites a recent seizure in Greater Manchester where organised crime groups set up shop fronts inside storage units to sell counterfeits.
The UK survey also shows where Trading Standards actually investigate. Ordinary shops featured for 87% of authorities. Social media featured for 35%, down from 50% in 2021/22, and websites for 25%, down from 37%.
Most brand monitoring runs the other way, online first. So the online case a brand builds and the shop or storage unit an officer visits are often two ends of the same operation, seen by two parties who do not share a screen. The survey names the intermediaries officers rely on: the Anti-Counterfeiting Group was engaged by 60% of authorities and the IPO Intelligence Hub by 46%. It also notes that IPO-supported IP training for officers has fallen to only two courses in 2026 to 2027, after the suspension of the IP Competency in the professional qualification.
That last point matters for anyone writing to Trading Standards. If fewer officers are trained in IP, a brand's report has to make the connection itself: which online seller, which premises, which goods, and why the brand believes they are linked.
Incoming reports rarely look like annual statistics. On 31 October Thailand's Consumer Protection Police Division searched a warehouse in Bangkok's Nong Khaem district and seized 26,117 suspected counterfeit supplements, cosmetics and perfumes, valued at more than 5 million baht. According to The Nation, investigators started from an online shop selling health and beauty products "at prices unusually far below market levels" and traced the stock to the warehouse. Police said the goods had been smuggled from a neighbouring country into northeastern Thailand. According to the police, the warehouse caretaker admitted coordinating orders for more than a year, dispatching 2,000 items a day on telephone instructions from a Chinese financier.
The brand names police listed run from Blackmores and Swisse to Chanel and La Mer. Each of those brands' teams would read the same report, and for all of them the seizure count is the least useful line in it. The useful lines are the online shop (and any other shops that share its details), the route through the northeast and the financier, because they can connect this warehouse to the next one.
A brand protection manager spends the week reading reports written by other people for their own purposes. Customs notifications come with a ten-day clock. Investigators send raid and test-purchase reports. Platforms send takedown results, and once a year the authorities publish statistics. Each report describes one place at one moment. The job is to answer on time, to notice when two reports describe the same operation, and to brief investigators on the next link to find rather than the next item to count.
This is what Eonpass is built for. We put customs notifications and online cases on one graph, so a new notification is checked against open cases when it arrives rather than when someone remembers. The same logic applies to raid reports and test purchases.
The 2025 reports say enforcement found more counterfeits than ever and that more of them are being finished inside Europe. They also say rights holders did not answer in 5.51% of customs procedures. When customs notifies your team of a detention next week, who checks it against the reports your investigators have already sent, before the ten working days run out?
Image: counterfeit earbuds and watches laid out after a seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the Champlain Port of Entry, New York, in 2019. CBP Photography, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.jpg), cropped.