Over 20,520 domain names are confiscated by law enforcement agencies because they were selling against the law counterfeit products, sportswear, electronic devices, pharmaceuticals, luxury products, even social network online piracy.
Counterfeiting is a type of trademark and it imitates a certain type of product and its purpose is to distribute the fake products with the intention of deceiving customers so they would purchase them.
Interpol, FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), Europol, NIPRCC (the US National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre), and police departments from 27 member states in Europe operated and supervised this operation called “In Our Sites (Project TransAtlantic VIII)”.
Last year many counterfeit goods were purchased and sold. These products had worth of $460 billion and this indicates that counterfeiting is a very large and growing business.
The goods that were sold ranged from cosmetics, clothes, accessories, lots of pirated unauthorized copies of video games, DVDs, even computer software. These products that are sold illegally are so much like the original ones and it is very hard to differentiate them from the genuine and original items. That kind of websites seem very trustworthy to the buyers and they rarely make the visitors think about their authenticity. This is exactly the goal of the scammers. They want to manipulate the people with their real-like product images, information, so their fake goods would be bought. The doubtful cheap price of the product is also a sign that these products are counterfeit.
According to the director of IPR Center the police authorities will continue the operation of targeting such websites which deal with the selling of counterfeit goods and engage in other ways of theft of intellectual property. Cooperating and working with law enforcement agencies and business owners from all over the world will help containing IP crimes and show that such criminals cannot escape without being punished for their illegal activities.
Names of the confiscated domain names are not released yet because the countries involved didn’t want them to be disclosed.
The official seals from the police authorities have been displayed on the seized domain names along with a message that is saying that the domain name was confiscated.
7,776 websites were seized by Europol in their fight against the trade of illegal and forged goods.