NYPD Busts Designer Knockoffs Worth $10 Million From Chinatown Street

Police officials said that New York City Police Department (NYPD) cops netted more than $10 million in “high-end” counterfeit goods Monday.

It happened during a crackdown on illegal street vendors in Lower Manhattan. The cops' sweep of knock-off sneakers, purses and other illicit goods on Canal Street, Chinatown led to 17 total arrests, reported New York Post. The NYPD will not investigate immigration statuses in the event any of the people charged are undocumented.

Chief of Patrol Jeff Maddrey said that the rogue vendors face a top charge of trademark counterfeiting property over $1,000, a felony in the state. The chief shared a few hours after the bust that the area of enforcement they went to, "resembled a local street market." He shared that they seized more than "three truckloads of merchandise.”

Maddrey said that NYPD will start to step up its outreach throughout New York City on how to legally obtain vendor’s licenses as the holiday season approaches. He also reminded sellers that peddling counterfeit trade merchandise is still illegal. Maddrey said that the cops recognize during the holidays, activities such as this will shoot up, and their "efforts to deter this conduct, to investigate this conduct, will be ongoing."

Most of the goods seized were from China or India, said Bill Friberg, a retired NYPD sergeant whom Seventh Precinct cops brought on the raid. Friberg, a managing partner at Triple I Associates LLC, shared that the stuff that the cops found were "poor-quality fakes."

As Maddrey held a phony Louis Vuitton bag, he quipped that it looked good to him, but that’s "why you have a specialist who comes and works with the company to tell us what’s good and what’s not.”

Pix 11 reported that people who purchase the goods in question do not have to fear criminal prosecution.

According to New York Daily News, Democratic Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, whose district covers Chinatown, said that hassling "17 street vendors who are just trying to pay their rent is not a serious approach to addressing intellectual property theft." She shared that according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, the U.S. loses "hundreds of billions of dollars every year due to fashion IP theft unfolding on the international level.”