---
title: Customs Notifications and Online Listings Belong on One Graph
description: EU customs tell brands who sent and received a detained shipment. Matched against online cases on one graph, that turns thousands of signals into a short list.
image: https://eonpass.com/hubfs/blog-images/eonpass-connection-graph-hero.jpg
---

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# Customs Notifications and Online Listings Belong on One Graph

EU customs tell brands who sent and received a detained shipment. Matched against online cases on one graph, that turns thousands of signals into a short list.

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

 Oct 21, 2026

---

**TL;DR**

- Brand-protection signals come from two worlds that rarely meet: online listings flagged by monitoring tools, and customs notifications about detained shipments.
- Under EU Regulation 608/2013, customs must tell a brand what was detained and, on request, the names and addresses of consignor and consignee and the goods' origin and route.
- EU customs detained 19.7 million articles at the border in 2024; most cases were post or courier parcels, the delivery end of online sales.
- The Commission's 2026 DSA decisions against Temu (EUR 200 million) and AliExpress (EUR 550 million) drew on customs data and found that penalised stores stayed active.
- Putting both signal types on one graph, filtered by importance, surfaces the few entities that move the goods and the routes beneath them.

---

Every brand-protection team we work with has the same problem. There are thousands of signals, and no good way to tell which ten deserve an investigation.

Those signals come from two places that rarely meet. Online, there are the listings and seller accounts flagged by whichever monitoring provider the brand uses. Offline, there are the notifications customs authorities send when they detain a suspect shipment. Most teams read the first in one tool and the second in an inbox, and the connection between the two lives in an investigator's head, when it exists at all.

## What a customs notification actually contains

In the EU, a brand that has filed an application for action with customs is told when goods suspected of infringing its rights are detained. Regulation (EU) No 608/2013 sets out what that notification carries. Article 17(4) requires customs to tell the brand the quantity and nature of the goods, with images where available, and, "upon request and where available to them", the "names and addresses of the consignee, the consignor and the declarant or the holder of the goods", along with "the origin, provenance and destination of the goods".

That is a sender, a recipient and a route, confirmed by a public authority. It is exactly the information an online investigation spends weeks trying to establish.

The volume is not small. According to the joint European Commission and EUIPO report on 2024 enforcement, customs detained 19.7 million articles at the EU border that year, up 12.25% on 2023, with an estimated value of EUR 1.5 billion, a ten-year high. Brands filed 1,577 national and 1,777 Union applications for action in 2024. Most detention cases concerned goods sent by post or express courier, even though sea cargo carried the most articles.

## Small parcels are online sales that crossed a border

The post and courier cases matter most for anyone who also monitors marketplaces. The Commission counted around 4.6 billion low-value consignments entering the EU in 2024, about 12 million parcels a day and twice as many as the year before. A parcel worth under EUR 150 sent to a private address is usually the delivery end of an online sale. When customs detains one, there is a listing somewhere that sold it.

Since 1 July 2026 those parcels pay a temporary EUR 3 customs duty per item, a stopgap the Commission described as bridging the gap until the EU Customs Data Hub is set up in 2028.

There is one catch worth knowing. Many small detentions run under the simplified procedure in Article 26 of the regulation, which lets customs destroy counterfeit goods in small consignments when the declarant or holder of the goods agrees or does not respond. In 2024, 24.23% of procedures ended in destruction this way, according to the same report. Under that procedure Article 17(4) does not apply, so the brand can request the names and addresses only if that person objects to the destruction. The notifications that do carry names are the ones worth matching against everything else the brand knows.

## What the Commission did with both kinds of evidence

Two decisions this year show regulators combining the two worlds that brand teams usually keep apart.

On 28 May 2026 the Commission fined Temu EUR 200 million under the Digital Services Act for failing to assess the risk of illegal products on its platform. The Commission said its investigation relied, among other things, on a mystery shopping exercise and on "data from EU customs and market surveillance authorities, which revealed high rates of non-compliance among products sold on Temu". In July we wrote about [Temu's own IP protection report and why delisting is not the same as stopping a seller](https://eonpass.com/blog/delisting-counterfeits-is-not-stopping-them).

On 20 July 2026 the Commission fined AliExpress EUR 550 million, the largest DSA fine so far, over the risk of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products. Among its findings, AliExpress "did not properly enforce its penalty policy for traders selling illegal products", and "stores selling illegal products were able to remain active on AliExpress, despite being penalised". Its mandatory brand authorisation system "proved ineffective and understaffed". AliExpress had until 20 October 2026 to submit an action plan.

The AliExpress finding describes a pattern every enforcement team recognises. A store is a disposable front, and penalising or removing it leaves the operator behind it untouched. The operator usually shows up somewhere else: a company registration, a warehouse address, a payment counterparty, or a consignee name on a detained shipment.

## Putting both on one graph

Put online and customs signals on the same graph and the pile starts to have a shape. A seller account links to a company. That company shows up as consignee on a detained shipment, and the shipment came through a route the brand has already seen three times.

Our graph lets an investigator filter the network by country and by entity type (companies, factories, logistics providers, traders and people) and then light up the first, second or third degree of connections around the matches. A further switch keeps only the chains that connect two matches. Filter by importance and switch to the hierarchy view, where payment links show in green, and the handful of entities that actually move the goods rise to the top, with the trade routes underneath them.

The point is to turn thousands of signals into a short list of targets worth chasing, and then to chase them until there is a real company and a bank account behind the listing. Money matters because it is the hardest thing for an operator to replace: in September we covered a [UK case where six years of counterfeit sales were estimated from a single bank account](https://eonpass.com/blog/counterfeit-sales-nobody-counted). When nothing links, we make a test purchase and let the seller reveal itself, as we described in our piece on [counterfeit K-beauty and what test purchases expose](https://eonpass.com/blog/counterfeit-k-beauty-images-test-purchases).

## What the law lets you do with customs data

Customs data comes with rules. Article 21 of Regulation 608/2013 says a brand may use the information it receives only for specific purposes: to start proceedings to determine whether its rights were infringed, in connection with criminal investigations by public authorities, to start criminal proceedings, to seek compensation from the infringer or other persons, and to agree destruction or the amount of a guarantee with the holder of the goods. Linking a consignee to an online seller in order to bring a case or claim compensation sits within those purposes. Anything built on customs data should stay inside them, and a brand's counsel should confirm how that applies in each Member State.

## Customs is consolidating its own picture

The EU is reorganising customs around the same idea. On 3 September 2026 the Council adopted its position on a new Union Customs Code, agreed with the European Parliament in March. It creates an EU Customs Data Hub, a single digital platform for customs data, and an EU Customs Authority in Lille that will run Union-level risk analysis and coordinate controls. Importers selling at a distance must use the hub from 1 July 2028, and all traders from 1 March 2034.

Customs is building one picture of the goods entering the EU. On the brand side, the notifications that come out of it still land in an inbox, far from the online cases they could confirm.

## The question for brand-protection teams

A customs detention is one of the few signals in brand protection that comes with a sender, a recipient and a route verified by an authority. It is worth more when it is read next to the online cases it might belong to. So, for the brand-protection teams reading this: when a customs notification lands on your desk, does anyone check the consignee against your open online cases?

## References

- Regulation (EU) No 608/2013 concerning customs enforcement of intellectual property rights, Articles 17, 21 and 26 ([text as adopted, via legislation.gov.uk](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2013/608/contents/adopted))
- European Commission and EUIPO, [EU enforcement of intellectual property rights: results at the EU border and in the EU internal market 2024](https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/observatory/documents/reports/2025_EU_Enforcement_report/EU_enforcement_of_IPRs:_results_at_EU_border_%26_EU_internal_market_2024_en.pdf), October 2025
- European Commission, [Tackling the challenges of e-commerce imports](https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/tackling-challenges-e-commerce-imports-2025-02-05_en), 5 February 2025
- European Commission, [EU introduces customs duties on low-value e-commerce packages](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_3045), 12 December 2025
- European Commission, [Commission fines Temu EUR 200 million for breaching the Digital Services Act](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1178), 28 May 2026
- European Commission, [Commission fines AliExpress EUR 550 million for breaching the Digital Services Act](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-fines-aliexpress-eu550-million-breaching-digital-services-act), 20 July 2026
- Council of the EU, [Statement of the Council's reasons on the Union Customs Code and the European Union Customs Authority](https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8190-2026-REV-2-ADD-1/en/pdf), adopted 3 September 2026

*The graph shown is from a real investigation, anonymized. This article describes the regulation in general terms and is not legal advice.*

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