Quote:
While counterfeits are a serious problem, this is an exaggeration.
Not so sure about that.
In 2015:
Quote:
As the U.S. Postal Service grapples with service cuts and massive budget shortfalls, an estimated $134.4 million dollars of its annual revenue is quietly slipping away to counterfeiters and perpetrators of other types of postal fraud.
Counterfeit stamps have been identified as a steady, recurring risk for the U.S. Postal Service, which reported a loss of $8.5 billion in the last fiscal year, and they are one of the 10 biggest threats to Postal Service revenue, according to the 2009 annual report of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the Post Office.
From an Executive USG Homeland Security report:
Quote:
Counterfeiting is no longer confined to street-corners and flea markets. The problem has
intensified to staggering levels, as shown by a recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) report, which details a 154 percent increase in counterfeits traded
internationally — from $200 billion in 2005 to $509 billion in 2016. Similar information collected
by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) between 2000 and 2018 shows that seizures
of infringing goods at U.S. borders have increased 10-fold, from 3,244 seizures per year to 33,810.
The scale of counterfeit activity online is evidenced as well by the significant efforts e-commerce
platforms themselves have had to undertake. A major e-commerce platform reports that its
proactive efforts prevented over 1 million suspected bad actors from publishing a single product
for sale through its platform and blocked over 3 billion suspected counterfeit listings from being
published to their marketplace. Despite efforts such as these, private sector actions have not been
sufficient to prevent the importation and sale of a wide variety and large volume of counterfeit and
pirated goods to the American public.
Given the above it is likely safe to say that the 2015 number of 134 million dollars is vastly larger now.
Posted 11/16/2022 1:30 pm
