Early this month, after an investigation that began in 2016, Spanish authorities dismantled a counterfeiting ring, arresting 39 people spread between Madrid (14), Seville (4), Girona (15), Málaga (3) and even as far afield as Tenerife (3), in the Canary Islands. They also searched 13 domiciles and inspected 22 warehouses, along the way seizing 242,501 items, €86,255 in cash, cellphones, tablets, laptops and a great many documents.
According to the report in Diffusion Sport, the ring was run by Senegalese nationals and had a defined hierarchy. The head of the organization was a woman who would travel back and forth between Spain and the exporting countries and receive most of the payments.
The ring also had a flexible modus operandi. It was forever changing its means of payment as well as the points of entry into the national territory. A former route ran through the U.K. The most recent one ran from China through Germany to Spain. Distribution routes changed within Spain as well, and, in fact, reached beyond Spanish borders.
The ring would manufacture or import such counterfeit items as apparel, footwear, jewelry and haberdashery and then attach or screen-print designer labels. Packaging firms often served as logistical hubs. Regional heads of distribution would dispatch merchandise to “relevant vendors,” also called “mailboxes” (“buzones”), who would deliver it, for the most part, to impoverished illegal immigrants from Africa. These would submit revenues to still other players, who would, in turn, send it up the hierarchy.
