Agents of the National Police have dismantled a distribution network for counterfeit high-quality sports shoes. Two of the cloned brands themselves filed a complaint with the National Police, verifying the sale of counterfeits of their products through various web pages. The two responsible for the plot have been arrested in Barcelona, 13 bank accounts, six accounts of a payment platform and six web pages have been blocked and their profiles on the most important social networks have been eliminated. It should be noted that the copies were of high quality, which added to the high sale price of the products led users to think that they were acquiring official items from leading brands.
The investigation began after the complaint of the legal representatives of two international sportswear brands, whose managers became aware of the sale through different Internet pages, of sneakers that appeared to be the original models of their companies.
Millionaire income in a year of activity
The investigations carried out made it possible to identify the two persons responsible for the illicit activity, who had gradually created a network of web pages through which they offered sports shoes from various internationally prestigious brands and sold them at a price similar to the market price, which that added to the high quality of the manufacture of counterfeits allowed them to obtain a large volume of clients both in Spain and outside of our country. So much so, that it is estimated that in little more than a year of commercial activity, they recorded income worth more than one and a half million euros in Spanish bank accounts, without ruling out a greater volume of profits that could have been entered in different foreign online payment platforms.
With the intention of making the investigations more difficult and giving the illicit business an appearance of legality, those investigated had founded two companies in Barcelona, the corporate purpose of which was retail trade through the Internet, thus giving greater credibility to the originality of the products offered and laundering the illicit origin of their income.
They avoided storing the merchandise thanks to the dropshipping method
The counterfeit items were purchased directly from suppliers located in China, merchandise that they later offered in their online stores but without the need to store it, since they used the distribution model called dropshipping , which consists in that the products are sent directly from the factory to the end customer without need to pass through the custody of those investigated. This distribution model was very beneficial for those investigated since in this way they did not need to have a place to store their products.
