---
title: "A Six-Month Head Start: Amazon's Counterfeit Unit and Online-to-Offline Enforcement"
description: "Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit is expanding in India. Its numbers show why online signals need offline reach: faster referrals, more specific takedowns."
image: https://eonpass.com/hubfs/blog-images/21-image-Oct-27-2026-02-33-25-4178-PM.jpg
---

[![logo-std@4x-100](https://eonpass.com/hs-fs/hubfs/logo-std@4x-100.jpg?width=170&height=49&name=logo-std@4x-100.jpg)](https://eonpass.com)

- [Home](https://eonpass.com)
- [About](https://eonpass.com/about)
- [Blog](https://eonpass.com/blog)
- [Industries](https://eonpass.com/industries)
  
    - [Automotive](https://eonpass.com/industries/automotive)
    - [Heritage Sportswear](https://eonpass.com/industries/sportswear)
    - [Leisure Footwear](https://eonpass.com/industries/footwear)
    - [Pharmaceuticals](https://eonpass.com/industries/pharma)

[Get Started](https://eonpass.com/get-started)

# A Six-Month Head Start: Amazon's Counterfeit Unit and Online-to-Offline Enforcement

Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit is expanding in India. Its numbers show why online signals need offline reach: faster referrals, more specific takedowns.

[Thomas Rossi](https://eonpass.com/blog/author/thomas-rossi)

 Oct 27, 2026

---

**TL;DR**

- Amazon is expanding its Counterfeit Crimes Unit in India and says it has ongoing investigations with the CBI. In 2025 its work with Chinese police and brands led to more than 70 raid actions against counterfeit manufacturers, suppliers and distributors.
- Speed: the unit's director says police partners told Amazon that its proactive data sharing cut their investigation time by six months, while online sellers can delete a shop and reopen under a new name.
- Specificity: raids that started from one brand's case found infringement against many brands, and a US court has ruled that similar listings alone do not show sellers are connected.
- Most brands keep online monitoring and offline evidence apart. Eonpass has been working with an online-monitoring team to join them, with details coming this week.

---

In August Amazon said it is expanding its Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) in India. Kebharu Smith, the unit's director and a former US federal prosecutor, told the news agency IANS that the goal is to strengthen work on the ground and to cooperate more closely with local law enforcement. "We have ongoing investigations with the CBI here in India as well," Smith said, referring to India's Central Bureau of Investigation. Amazon says it works with more than 1.7 million sellers in India, half of them in tier two and tier three cities.

India is the latest step in a direction the unit has been taking since it launched in June 2020: away from the listing and towards the people, premises and money behind it.

## The headline numbers happen offline

These are Amazon's own figures, from the IANS interview and from the company's first Trustworthy Shopping Experience Report, published in April:

- Since 2020 the CCU has pursued more than 32,000 bad actors through litigation and criminal referrals to law enforcement.
- In 2025 Amazon identified, seized and disposed of more than 15 million counterfeit products worldwide.
- Also in 2025, Amazon's collaboration with Chinese law enforcement and brands led to more than 70 local raid actions against manufacturers, suppliers and distributors of counterfeit products.
- Amazon says its legal actions have resulted in more than $300 million in court-ordered restitution and helped incarcerate more than 290 criminals.

Amazon also reports how many listings it blocks, but the figures that measure the CCU are these, and almost every one of them ends in a courtroom, a police file or a warehouse door. We made the same argument in July, when we wrote that [delisting counterfeits is not stopping them](https://eonpass.com/blog/delisting-counterfeits-is-not-stopping-them). Amazon's unit is a large-scale version of the alternative.

## Speed: a six-month head start

In a 2025 interview published by Amazon, Smith described how a CCU referral works. When the unit hands a case to law enforcement, it shares data "that would otherwise require a subpoena or legal process," and it does so proactively. Smith said police partners told the unit that this sharing helped them "jump-start their investigations and reduce investigation time by six months." In one case, he said, law enforcement told the team the referral gave them "a six-month head start."

Six months matters because the online side moves in days. A report published on 24 October by Vietnam's Nhan Dan newspaper put it plainly: once detected, sellers "need only delete their online shop and change their account name to resume trading." A takedown costs the counterfeiter a storefront, and police who start six months earlier reach the stock behind the next one.

Convictions themselves stay slow. Amazon and Pandora reported a counterfeit jewellery operation trying to sell into nine European countries to Chinese law enforcement and supported what Amazon calls "a nearly three-year investigation," which ended with the main offender sentenced to more than three years in prison. Any months saved at the start come off a timeline that long.

## Specificity: one brand online, many brands at the door

Smith also described what happens when an online case reaches a building. "In many of the enforcement actions we took in 2024, we partnered with a single brand, but when our partners entered the facility where counterfeits were being made, they found infringement against many brands."

A brand monitoring marketplaces sees the listings that hit its own trademarks. The facility shows the whole operation, including the brands that never filed a complaint. Amazon gives another example: the CCU traced counterfeit products of a ridesharing brand from a US-based seller to a network of manufacturers in China. Coordinated raids seized more than 2,100 counterfeit items, and Amazon secured a $1.1 million judgment against the primary bad actor. The online trail identified one seller, and the offline work found the network behind that seller.

Specificity matters in the other direction too. Smith said the CCU now also targets "invalid trademarks being used to access Amazon's Brand Registry to submit fake infringement notices." The takedown channel is itself under attack, which means a takedown request is only as strong as the evidence behind it.

## Courts are asking for the connections

In May, Chief Judge Virginia M. Kendall of the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois severed six defendants from a Chrome Hearts suit against 92 online sellers. Judge Kendall held that "mere allegations that two or more unrelated defendants stole the same product in the same way without ever interacting with one another" are not enough to sue them together. The Fashion Law, reporting on the ruling, listed the kinds of evidence that would connect sellers: common ownership, shared payment accounts or coordinated financial operations, and demonstrable collaboration.

Listings that look alike do not prove they belong to one operation. A shared payment account, a shared warehouse or a shared shipping route is the kind of link that does, and that evidence mostly sits offline.

## Most brands do not have a CCU

Amazon's unit combines former prosecutors, law enforcement officials and data analysts, working on one marketplace's data. Smith himself points at the channels outside that marketplace: influencer "generic link" schemes "designed to operate outside of our store," livestream shopping, and encrypted chats.

A brand selling across several marketplaces and social channels collects its online signals in one set of tools. Its offline evidence (customs detentions, test purchases, raid reports, payment records) sits with other teams and other providers. Joining those two halves is where the six months come from, and it is how a takedown decision becomes specific enough to hold up when a seller challenges it.

## Something is coming this week

That join is what we have been building. Eonpass already puts [customs notifications and online cases on one graph](https://eonpass.com/blog/customs-notifications-online-listings-one-graph). For the past months we have been working with a team that does online monitoring on a combined offer: their detection across the open web, connected to our view of the shipments, payments and premises behind the listings. The aim is faster referrals, and takedowns that target the operation rather than the storefront. We will share the details later this week.

The CCU's numbers make the case that counterfeiting gets stopped offline. Here is the test for your own programme: if your team had to hand the police a referral tomorrow, how many of your open listings could it tie to a premises, a payment account or a shipment, and how long would building that file take?

## References

- IANS (via Free Press Journal), [Amazon Expands Anti-Counterfeit Unit In India To Protect 1.7 Million Sellers and Consumers: CCU Chief](https://www.freepressjournal.in/business/amazon-expands-anti-counterfeit-unit-in-india-to-protect-17-million-sellers-and-consumers-ccu-chief), 21 August 2026
- Amazon, [Inside the AI systems Amazon uses to protect every part of your shopping experience](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-trustworthy-shopping-experience-report-2025) (Trustworthy Shopping Experience Report), 22 April 2026
- Amazon, [Stopping counterfeits at the source: An interview with Kebharu Smith, director of Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit](https://trustworthyshopping.aboutamazon.com/stopping-counterfeits-at-the-source), 2025
- Amazon, [Amazon efforts lead to criminal sanctions and $180 million in penalties against bad actors](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-counterfeit-crimes-unit), 25 June 2025
- The Fashion Law, [Chrome Hearts Ruling Adds to Pressure on the Schedule A Model](https://www.thefashionlaw.com/chrome-hearts-ruling-adds-to-pressure-on-the-schedule-a-model/), 21 May 2026. Case: *Chrome Hearts LLC v. The Partnerships and Unincorporated Associations Identified on Schedule A*, No. 1:26-cv-00497 (N.D. Ill.)
- Nhan Dan Online, [Combating counterfeit goods in digital environment](https://en.nhandan.vn/combating-counterfeit-goods-in-digital-environment-post168180.html), 24 October 2026

*Image: an Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota. Photo by Tony Webster, [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amazon_Fulfillment_Center_MSP1_\(48609899896).jpg), cropped.*

## Source

- [*Free Press Journal (IANS)*: Amazon Expands Anti-Counterfeit Unit In India To Protect 1.7 Million Sellers and Consumers: CCU Chief](https://www.freepressjournal.in/business/amazon-expands-anti-counterfeit-unit-in-india-to-protect-17-million-sellers-and-consumers-ccu-chief)

## Similar posts

### Get notified on new anti-counterfeiting insights

Be the first to know about new anti-counterfeiting, supply chain security and brand protection insights to build or refine your anti-counterfeiting function with the tools and knowledge of today’s industry.

 

**EonPass Inc. | [![icons8-linkedin-30](https://eonpass.com/hs-fs/hubfs/icons8-linkedin-30.png?width=20&height=20&name=icons8-linkedin-30.png)](https://www.linkedin.com/company/eonpass) |** 400 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301 | © 2026 EonPass All rights reserved | [Privacy Policy](https://46322274.hs-sites.com/privacy)

[Powered by Atlas - a B2B SaaS HubSpot theme](https://www.kalungi.com/atlas-hubspot-theme-for-b2b-saas-software)

```json
{
  "@context" : "https://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Thomas Rossi",
    "url" : "https://eonpass.com/blog/author/thomas-rossi"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2026-10-27T14:35:13.355Z",
  "datePublished" : "2026-10-27T14:35:13.000Z",
  "headline" : "A Six-Month Head Start: Amazon's Counterfeit Unit and Online-to-Offline Enforcement",
  "image" : [ "https://eonpass.com/hubfs/blog-images/21-image-Oct-27-2026-02-33-25-4178-PM.jpg" ],
  "mainEntityOfPage" : {
    "@id" : "https://eonpass.com/blog/amazon-counterfeit-crimes-unit-online-to-offline",
    "@type" : "WebPage"
  },
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "url" : "https://eonpass.com/hubfs/logo-std@3x-1.png"
    }
  }
}
```

```json
{
  "@context" : "https://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Article",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "jobTitle" : "Founder & CEO, Eonpass",
    "name" : "Thomas Rossi",
    "sameAs" : [ "https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasr0ssi/" ],
    "url" : "https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasr0ssi/"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2026-10-27T14:33:25Z",
  "datePublished" : "2026-10-27T14:33:25Z",
  "description" : "Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit is expanding in India. Its numbers show why online signals need offline reach: faster referrals, more specific takedowns.",
  "headline" : "A Six-Month Head Start: Amazon's Counterfeit Unit and Online-to-Offline Enforcement",
  "image" : "https://46322274.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/46322274/blog-images/21-image-Oct-27-2026-02-33-25-4178-PM.jpg",
  "mainEntityOfPage" : {
    "@id" : "https://eonpass.com/blog/amazon-counterfeit-crimes-unit-online-to-offline",
    "@type" : "WebPage"
  },
  "publisher" : {
    "@id" : "https://eonpass.com/#organization"
  },
  "url" : "https://eonpass.com/blog/amazon-counterfeit-crimes-unit-online-to-offline"
}
```

```json
{
  "@context" : "https://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement" : [ {
    "@type" : "ListItem",
    "item" : "https://eonpass.com",
    "name" : "Home",
    "position" : 1
  }, {
    "@type" : "ListItem",
    "item" : "https://eonpass.com/blog",
    "name" : "Blog",
    "position" : 2
  }, {
    "@type" : "ListItem",
    "item" : "https://eonpass.com/blog/amazon-counterfeit-crimes-unit-online-to-offline",
    "name" : "A Six-Month Head Start: Amazon's Counterfeit Unit and Online-to-Offline Enforcement",
    "position" : 3
  } ]
}
```