The counterfeiting Olympics

About three months ago, French police raided at dawn and shut down 11 stores in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Ouen – site of a famous flea market and not far from the Stade de France. It is also one of three municipalities divvying up the 52 hectares of the Olympic Village for this summer’s games. According to Reuters, police arrested ten people and seized 63,000 articles of clothing, shoes and leather goods. Many of the items were counterfeit, and many, if not all, went right into compacting garbage trucks on the scene.

Michel Lavaud, Chief of Security for the département of Seine-Saint-Denis (which contains all these municipalities), told Reuters, “We’ve been talking about the problem of counterfeits for the last two years” – presumably, then, in preparation for the Olympics. Axel Wilmort, a doctoral student in economic anthropology at an institute called LAVUE (Architecture City Urbanism Environment Laboratory), also quoted, said the police had been cracking down on street vendors on the Parisian outskirts over the previous three months. “There is a will to erase all signs of precarity, poverty and undesirables.” (In France “precarity” means a hand-to-mouth way of life attributable to some form of economic uncertainty, like unsteady employment.)

According to a letter written by a district mayor, addressed to the Minister of the Interior and seen by Reuters, there have been ten raids since February on the slopes of nearby Montmartre, and some 70 tons of merchandise were destroyed in March.

French Customs reported in May that it had seized 20.48 million counterfeit items in 2023, 77.6 percent more than the 11.53 million of the previous year. Of these, 1.33 million were toys and games, and another 1.17 million were clothes and accessories.

In its annual report for 2023, French Customs says that games, toys and sporting goods are the favorite categories for counterfeiting, accounting for more than 40 percent of all seizures. In 2023, Customs seized 8.5 million items, up 48.65 percent year over year.

The European scene seems to mirror the French

In May 2023, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) coordinated, with Portugal and especially Bulgaria in the lead, something called Operation JAD Pirates I (“JAD” is short for joint-action day). Over 11 days, this operation seized 1.37 million counterfeit items, worth about €33 million. The two top producers were Turkey (61%) – hence the importance of the Balkan route and proximate Bulgaria’s lead role – and China (29%).

About 6 percent of the items were qualified as “dangerous” and another 22 percent as “potentially dangerous.” Some 140 “illegal migrants” were involved in the trafficking. Seized clothing and accessories amounted to 509,150 items, toys and games to 98,014, and shoes to 27,782. This was far behind tobacco products, which exceeded 3.6 million, but the tobacco total tots up cigarettes, not packs or cartons.

Bulgaria was the top country in terms of both the value and the number of items seized. Spain was seventh in number but second in value.

Another operation, Fake Star II, conducted from April 10 to Sept. 30, 2023, seized a bit less than 14 million counterfeit items. Of these, 1.14 million were “sports cloths” and half a million were shoes. This time, 18 countries were involved, with Spain and Greece in the lead. According to the operation’s findings, the crime works as follows:

• Entry of semi-finished products in containers
• Distribution by sea: misused shipment containers
• Storage in warehouses on private property
• Distribution by land
• Reception of counterfeits and label switching at intermediary points
• Sale or auction on private property

Once again, the top producers were Turkey and China. “Brand infringement” expanded from luxury to inexpensive brands and more brands in general. Moreover, 65 percent of the labels and separate unlabeled products pointed to a domestic final production phase.

In addition, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) keeps an “Intellectual Property and Youth Scoreboard,” according to which 10 percent of the EU population aged 15 to 24 admits to the intentional purchase of “fake sporting equipment” and 7 percent to having purchased it by accident. The office puts the lost revenue attributable to the sale of these counterfeit goods at an annual €851 million for the EU. And France has the highest losses.

Back in France, meanwhile, the Manufacturers Union (UniFab) cites a study by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), according to which 40 percent of “French consumers” have at some point purchased counterfeit goods, a rise of 3 percent since 2018. One in five 15- to 18-year-olds (equivalent to 5 percent of the French population) say the counterfeits they buy are mostly sporting goods. Generally, 34 percent of the French have bought counterfeits unwittingly.

There is also an intangible form of counterfeiting: the pirating of sports broadcasts. According to EUIPO, such illegal streaming is an indulgence for 12 percent of the EU’s citizens – and 27 percent of those aged 15 to 24. This figure rises to 47 percent for young Bulgarians, 42 percent for young Spaniards, 39 percent for young Slovenians and 34 percent for young Irishmen. Streaming accounts for 58 percent of overall EU broadcast piracy, downloads for 32 percent.

Olympic arrangements

What security chief Lavaud and budding economic anthropologist Wilmort say about the recent zeal of French law enforcement appears to be true. The French Ministry of the Interior announced in May that it was “mobilizing,” with respect to its totals for 2023, an additional 14,000 policemen and gendarmes to deal with the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

For its part, French Customs is working with the Inter-ministerial Delegation to the Olympic and Paralympic Games (DIJOP) and “mobilizing” 5,800 agents, as it recounts in the aforementioned annual report. It will be dispatching the agents mostly to Île-de-France (Greater Paris) – especially its Hauts-de-Seine département (the capital’s western flank) – and to Marseille.

All of this ensues from the “Zero Delinquency” plan put together at the Ministry of the Interior’s behest and directed at things like illegal street vending and traffic control, especially around any Olympic business, whether it’s an event or a route through town for spectators. Customs will also be looking for fireworks, which rioters fired at the police last summer.

For the opening ceremony, the French government will be establishing an eight-kilometer perimeter on both sides of the River Seine on July 18, a week before the opening ceremony of the Olympics. All riverside buildings and buildings with a sight line to the river, where the opening ceremony will be taking place, will fall within this perimeter. The 20,000 people who live or work in the area must register online with a government platform if they hope to get in. Outsiders will nevertheless be permitted to cross the area in spots and visit its museums, which will be more or less open for business. That said, even pedestrians will need a pass to penetrate the so-called grey perimeter on July 18–26.

By the reckoning of French Customs, the Olympics will draw 16 million visitors, about 10 percent of them from abroad. Included are about 230 delegations and 120 heads of state.

UniFab, incidentally, has helped train some 1,200 customs agents to verify the authenticity of merchandise specific to the Olympics, according to Reuters, and France has 70 agents combing the internet to detect counterfeiting rings, both domestic and foreign.