Meta's social platform has become a hotbed for counterfeit goods! Chinese sellers take the lead

According to the latest report from Ghostdata, Meta's three major social platforms, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, have become home to a large number of counterfeit sellers while successfully developing e-commerce businesses.

With the introduction of technology plug-ins such as Facebook Pay, the emergence of Messenger as a unified chat and sales tool, and WhatsApp's online directory for businesses, Meta has become a new channel for counterfeit sellers to get rich. These features have made it easier for counterfeit sellers to sell.

This, in turn, further exposed Facebook’s inability to control such activity on its platform, which led to a growing number of counterfeit sellers on the platform and ultimately led to a general distrust among users that is still evident today.

Although Meta has made a lot of noise about its actions to combat the sale and promotion of counterfeit products, saying it is constantly improving its auditing measures and reporting tools and investing in technology to prevent counterfeit activities, the research suggests that Meta's so-called actions to combat counterfeit goods have been ineffective.

According to research, WhatsApp is the favorite and most commonly used tool for counterfeit sellers, especially WhatsApp Business for corporate users. Currently 40% of Chinese counterfeit sellers use this software.

Ghostdata analysts used software to identify counterfeit sellers and counted the number of active counterfeit seller accounts on Facebook at the end of October 2021 to 26,770 in just 20 days.

The study showed that the average number of friends for each fake seller account was more than 1,250. In addition, most of these sellers were from China, and a small number of sellers from Russia, Turkey, Indonesia, Ukraine and Brazil were also found.

Ghostdata estimates that there are about 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese sellers of counterfeit goods on Facebook and Instagram, with an annual turnover of between $1.8 billion and $2.1 billion. It also stressed: "This is a fairly conservative estimate."

Among them, luxury clothing and accessories brands have the largest number of counterfeit goods, led by Louis Vuitton, which accounts for 58% of the total number of counterfeit luxury goods, followed by Chanel, Fendi, Prada and Gucci.

Editor ✎ Xiao Zhu/

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