Amazon has launched the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX), a new private sector partnership designed to make it safer to shop online and more difficult for counterfeiters to move among different stores to attempt to sell their counterfeit goods.
According to the tech giant, ACX allows participating stores to share information about confirmed counterfeiters who may already have attempted to use their services to try to sell counterfeit products. By sharing this information, ACX participants can identify and stop perpetrators more quickly than they otherwise would, the firm said.
“We want our customers to have confidence in their shopping experience and for brands to know they are protected from counterfeits,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Services.
“As we laid out in our blueprint for private and public sector partnership to stop counterfeiters, we think it is critical to share information about confirmed counterfeiters to help the entire industry stop these criminals earlier.”
Amazon added that it has been working with other members of ACX to pilot the exchange, ensure the appropriate guardrails, and design a scalable way to broaden participation to additional companies interested in stopping counterfeiters. Private sector partnerships around data sharing are seen as a crucial means of combating counterfeiting in the retail sector. Through ACX, Amazon said it has already detected hundreds of matching accounts where the same counterfeiter tried to create selling accounts on Amazon and at least one other store operator.
The power of ACX comes from the fact that as soon as one of the participating stores catches a counterfeiter and shares the account information through the exchange, all the other stores participating in ACX can know about that counterfeiter and can stop them even more quickly in their store.
In a statement, Daniel Castro, director of the Center for Data Innovation, further highlighted the importance of this type of voluntary collaboration.
“Active cooperation among private sector firms is key to combating illicit counterfeiting networks. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security called on private sector stakeholders to take a more active role in detecting and preventing the trafficking of counterfeit goods. It’s encouraging to see Amazon and other stores answer this call by creating the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange,” he said.
