How to avoid counterfeit and unsafe products online : Life Kit : NPR

Nearly 70 percent of people were deceived into buying a counterfeit product online at least once last year, according to research from Michigan State University. And buying knockoff versions of products can be dangerous. Kari Kammel, the director at the Center for Anti Counterfeiting and Product Protection at Michigan State University, shares tips for how to avoid counterfeit and unsafe products, especially online.

MARIELLE SEGARRA, HOST:

You're listening to LIFE KIT...

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SEGARRA: ...From NPR.

Hey, everybody. It's Marielle. Before I was the host of LIFE KIT, I was a financial reporter for the public radio show Marketplace. And one time, I went to Rhode Island to interview a woman who owned a small company that makes bird feeders. A customer had bought a hummingbird feeder from her brand on Amazon, or so they thought, because it was a fake - a convincing one with her company's name and phone number on it, but it didn't work. The pieces didn't fit together. That kept happening to this company, and it happens to all sorts of companies, large and small, that somewhere, someone decides to make a cheap, fake version of their product and sell it online. That's what you call a counterfeit.

KARI KAMMEL: A counterfeit product is something that stems from what's called a trademark counterfeit.

SEGARRA: Basically, the seller is trying to make money off of some other company's reputation.

KAMMEL: The unauthorized use of the trademark is what makes it a counterfeit because it signals to the marketplace that that particular item is coming from the brand when it indeed is not.

SEGARRA: That's Kari Kammel. She's the director of the Center for Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection at Michigan State University. Counterfeits are often a waste of money 'cause they fall apart quickly or they don't work. But maybe more importantly, they can be dangerous. Fake electronics can malfunction or light on fire. If you're buying a counterfeit version of something you're ingesting or putting on your skin, you could get really sick.

KAMMEL: So we look at the studies of what they found in counterfeit meds or other products, and it varies from, like, highly dangerous chemicals to, you know, just filth and dirty things that shouldn't be, you know, put in a body or come anywhere near humans and sometimes a combination of all the above.

SEGARRA: Kari says counterfeiting is rampant online, and it's hard to spot a fake, even when you're holding it in your hands.

KAMMEL: We have in our main office this, like, counterfeit museum, where we have a lot of authentic next to counterfeit. And, you know, when we bring people in, you know, sometimes we'll hand them the two products or hand them the one and say, is this real or is this fake?

SEGARRA: Most of the time, they can't tell the difference. On this episode of LIFE KIT, Kari shares her best tips for how to avoid buying counterfeits online and in stores, too. And while we're talking mainly about counterfeits, which are fake versions of some brand's product, the advice could also help you avoid unsafe or illegitimate products in general.

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SEGARRA: Kari, what are the most commonly counterfeited consumer products?

KAMMEL: We see it really across multiple industries. And a lot of people I talk to, when they first think of counterfeiting, they think of luxury - luxury handbags or other types of products like that. But we see it across, you know, almost any industry you can think of, from the toy industry to the automotive industry to consumer products to things like baby formula and food.

SEGARRA: Yeah, and it's really potentially dangerous. When you think about some of the products you just listed, in what ways might a counterfeit product be harmful to your health?

KAMMEL: You know, if it's a product that you can put in your body or on your body or in or on, you know, another human or I would even say a pet or an animal, there's a really high - you know, a high potential risk of serious harm and even death in some cases depending on what that is.

There's other products, too, that maybe you don't put on or in your body, but are - or there is some type of lifesaving measures. For example, airbags and cars or brake pads - you know, things that are there that are not, of course, touching your skin, but they're there to protect you in case an accident happens or in case you need to break quickly. And when we see those type of things counterfeited, the risk is really - could be really great depending on what that is, 'cause we're talking about a product that hasn't gone through quality control. There's no safety considerations. So you really don't know what it's made out of.

SEGARRA: It's so scary. So, OK, let's say you are shopping online. What are some of the best practices for avoiding counterfeits?

KAMMEL: One of the important things, you know, that we tell people is know where you're shopping from, first of all, and understand, you know, where you're buying something from. Looking at the ecommerce space, the safest place for me to shop is directly from the brand itself or from the manufacturer of the product. So most brands, not all, but most will have their own website where you can buy their product direct from them. Oftentimes that may take a couple more days shipping. You may not get it in one day or two days. It may be five days or seven days. But that by far is the most safest place to buy that from.

SEGARRA: OK, so takeaway one - whenever possible, if you're shopping online, buy directly from a brand that you trust. You can do that on the brand's website. You can also do that through an ecommerce platform like Amazon. But that's a little trickier because you'll need to make sure you're actually buying from the brand and not from the platform itself or from a third-party seller on that platform. A quick note here, Amazon, Target, CVS, and Walmart have all been sponsors of NPR at some point. It's not why I mentioned them, but, you know, full disclosure. Are says there's another way to shop on ecommerce platforms, and that's buying from a third-party seller.

KAMMEL: They acquire product some way - really, usually it's unknown how they acquire it - and they post it for sale on an ecommerce platform. If you're looking for a particular brand and you're on one of these sites, you may find five listings for that particular product you're looking for. You may find 10,000 listings.

SEGARRA: And that's something not everyone realizes when they're shopping on Amazon or on walmart.com, which also allows for third-party sellers or on other ecommerce platforms. You're not necessarily buying a product directly from a brand or from the platform itself. Often you'll be buying from a third party that you don't know anything about.

KAMMEL: Now, are all third-party sellers, you know, bad actors? Certainly, no. But what's happened is counterfeiters and other bad actors have found this to be a bit of a loophole for essentially getting in front of consumers on ecommerce platforms. So this is an area where it becomes really more challenging for a consumer to understand what do these postings actually mean? Because you may see the brand name of your product there and think, Oh, well, there it is, and the picture looks just like the product I buy. Sometimes it takes a little digging on these sites to click through like, OK, this is the product. Who is selling it? Where are they located? And sometimes it'll take you a couple clicks down the road and you'll see something like cheap kitchen goods, but you're there to buy an electronic or you're there to buy a backpack. These can be warning signs. Why would someone who's selling kitchen utensils all of a sudden be also selling electronics or backpacks or something else?

So sometimes that disconnect is obvious, and you can see it, but you have to be able to slow down for a minute because that's the goal when you're shopping safe - right? - is to say, where is my product coming from? Can I be sure about this before I purchase it?

SEGARRA: Takeaway two - if you're shopping on an ecommerce site and you are thinking about buying from a third-party seller, do some digging. Check to see who you're actually buying from. If this is Amazon, you're going to look for the words sold by on the right hand side of the page, and then click on the seller information. Do they list an address? What kinds of products did they sell? What's their company name? If you search for it online, do you find anything? Are says you should be especially careful when it comes to things like pharmaceuticals.

KAMMEL: It's very easy to counterfeit pharmaceuticals, especially if you're thinking of something like a pill, right? You can buy a pill press, make your own pills. It's something very easy and very low cost to counterfeit. I've heard people say, oh, well, what's the worst that's going to happen? It just has a little salt water in it or something like that, and actually, no, that isn't the worst that can happen. That's probably on the good side.

The worst that can happen is it's full of a bunch of poison, right? And it can really hurt somebody. And oftentimes they may not even know where the root of their problem is coming from. They may think it's something totally different because they naively thought that the product that they bought online was safe, like it would have been if they'd purchased it in a store.

SEGARRA: So I'm thinking like, for instance, if I'm buying some sort of medication or personal care product online, I pretty much only want to buy it directly from the seller, from the brand itself or the manufacturer.

KAMMEL: So if you're buying a medication, at least if it's prescription-based, you should only be buying it from a authorized pharmacy, for example. So there's a great organization out there called the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, and they do a lot of work on what pharmacies online are actually legitimate and what aren't. In a very scary statistic, I think it's well over 90% of online pharmacies are fake. So for example, if you shop with one of the big national chain pharmacies, they will have a website in ways that you can order online or get mail order. That's a legitimate location, right? That may not be direct from the actual manufacturer of the pharmaceutical, but it's from a pharmacy, and they're licensed in order to do that. As far as consumer care products, you may want to still buy that from a pharmacy or I would say another retailer that doesn't allow third-party sellers.

SEGARRA: Takeaway three - only get prescription medication from a licensed pharmacy. Fda.gov links to the pharmacy licensing databases for states and U.S. territories. You can click on yours and see if your pharmacy is listed. If not, the FDA says, don't use that pharmacy. And Kari says, if you're taking some non-prescription pill or supplement, don't get it from a random third-party seller online, and don't buy pills on social media, either. It's too risky.

Is there anything you would never buy from a third-party seller online?

KAMMEL: Yeah. Quite a few things, actually. I would never buy vitamins. I would never buy, of course, pharmaceuticals. But even other things too like, you know, I mean, there was this case that was out of Ohio a couple of years ago. It seemed really, really innocuous. This woman bought a retractable dog leash. It snapped off and blinded her. You know, just things that you might not think are super high risk could potentially be really high risk, right? And it certainly isn't saying that every third-party seller out there is a bad actor or is selling counterfeit product. There's a lot of legitimate sellers out there that are doing this, too - right? - that you can find them, and you can see that, you know, they have their own business, and they're located in, you know, a certain area, and they have a good reputation online.

I mean, another thing to look at, too, is reviews. Reviews aren't always, you know, a hundred percent accurate or even a hundred percent real. But sometimes, those can be big indicators as well to see there's a lot of people saying, like, what is this product that I got? - or, you know, I ordered shampoo and I instead got, you know, a jack for my car. Like, what's going on here?

SEGARRA: Yeah. Or they might say, like, this shampoo burned my scalp.

KAMMEL: Yes.

SEGARRA: And if you see a bunch of that, definitely don't order the shampoo.

KAMMEL: Correct. Correct.

SEGARRA: Yeah. I think what's so scary about personal care products is that you might not know that it's a counterfeit, and you're just rubbing this other substance on your scalp or ingesting this thing that you think is food, but it's actually - I don't know. I don't know what it is.

KAMMEL: Yeah. And in that sense, it's - I mean, it's very scary. I mean, we've built up as a society, you know, trust in our marketplace - in our brick-and-mortar marketplace. Like, when I go to my local pharmacy or my local grocery store, you know, or my local retail box store, I don't question that if I buy a shampoo off the shelf - that it's going to burn my scalp, right? I mean, if it does, maybe I think, oh, I was allergic to that or something to that effect. But online, it's a very different space.

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SEGARRA: We've been talking about Amazon a lot. A spokesperson told us in an email that the company has measures in place to prevent counterfeit and unsafe products from being listed and that it continuously monitors the platform, that it'll remove counterfeit and unsafe products, block accounts and even work with law enforcement to protect customers and that customers can always get a full refund if a product isn't as advertised. Also, Amazon does work with brands to find counterfeiters' facilities and get them shut down. In 2023, it identified and disposed of more than 7 million counterfeit products worldwide.

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SEGARRA: I wonder - you talked about the trust we have in brick-and-mortar stores. Are we at all likely to encounter counterfeits at physical stores?

KAMMEL: So, I mean, in the U.S., we do know it still happens from time to time. It's usually by some bad actor infiltrating a legitimate supply chain. It's not because of, you know, just a total failure to vet who is selling products. If you were to buy a counterfeit product from a brick-and-mortar store, you can go right back to that store and deal with it, right? I mean, there's a lot of different ways to deal with it. If they don't deal with it appropriately, you know where their business address is. You can file a lawsuit. That's sort of the crux of this problem with the third-party sellers is that most of them you can't find, because once they get shut down - let's say it's discovered that they are selling counterfeit, and they may get shut down by one of these e-commerce platforms -you can't find them anymore. There's no one to follow up with.

SEGARRA: Yeah. There's this discount store I used to go to near where I live. And I bought a couple of cheap electronics there, like a scale, and I bought an alarm clock, and I brought them home and neither of them worked. And I brought it back, and they were, like, sort of begrudgingly giving me refunds for these things. But I stopped going to that store, because basically I was like, well, how do I know if your shampoos are not going to work because they're not the real deal, you know? It was like - I felt, like, a red flag there in a physical store.

KAMMEL: Yeah.

SEGARRA: And maybe because they sell things at such a low price...

KAMMEL: Yeah.

SEGARRA: ...They're not super-careful about it.

KAMMEL: Yeah, and speaking about stores like that and also things - I mean, similar, like, flea markets, you know, or other - where you have, like, highly discounted things that you can - you sort of know that they may not have come direct from the manufacturer. I mean, your situation gave you some red flags to say, hmm, I'm not sure where this stuff came from. Do I really want to risk it? Probably not.

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SEGARRA: Takeaway four - be careful at in-person stores, too, especially if you're getting a steep discount. You can get counterfeits and illegitimate products at brick-and-mortar stores.

What can you do when you have a product in front of you that you've just bought? Are there ways to look at it, to examine the label, to smell it - whatever - to try to determine whether it's a counterfeit?

KAMMEL: So if it's something that we call, like, an obvious counterfeit, yeah, you may be able to see that. You know, if you - and I say obvious counterfeit. Like, there's something really glaringly wrong with it. Maybe it does smell funny. Maybe there's misspellings on the packaging or, you know, just all kinds of things. Like, maybe the logo looks wrong, or the coloring looks wrong or - you know, I mean, it's worth taking a pause to look at it.

But unfortunately, as technology is getting better, the counterfeits are getting better, too. So there's no way to be able to, you know, 100% say with certainty, like, I know this is the authentic product that I just bought from a third-party seller. The only one that can do that is actually the brand or the manufacturer. They're the only ones that can truly authenticate. But what as a consumer we can do is, you know, at least try to go to the safest place we can to buy our products. And then if there is something obvious, to not ignore it, right? If it is shampoo that's burning your scalp, like, please don't ignore that.

SEGARRA: Yeah. Well, what should you do if you're - if you suspect that a product you've bought is counterfeit?

KAMMEL: So one is report to whatever place you purchased it from, whether that's an e-commerce platform, if it's a social media platform. And I would say some of the platforms make it very difficult to report suspected counterfeit. You can only say, I'm dissatisfied with the product. But I do think it's important to say, I think this is a fake product. And if it is something that's dangerous to say it - right? - to put it in writing, to let them know that.

The other thing that I have done, again, with varying levels of success is I reach out to the actual brand. I did this at one point with some face cream that I bought from a brick-and-mortar store, but it was again, one of these discount stores. I said, I just want to see if you'll let me verify, is this really your product? So I read them off the serial numbers and everything on it and they said, this is not ours. Don't use it.

Then in some cases, you can report to law enforcement. So a year and a half ago, the Informed Consumers Act was passed, which requires ecommerce platforms that allow sales above a certain amount to vet the sellers. But within that law, it also opened it up that the states' attorney generals now can bring cases on behalf of their citizens against platforms that they don't think are protecting their citizens. So, you know, there are things that can be done. The other thing I would say too is, don't use it. Even if it may seem it's safe, it's not worth it.

SEGARRA: Takeaway five - if you think you bought a counterfeit or unsafe product online, stop using it and report it to the ecommerce platform. You could also reach out to the legitimate brand if this is a counterfeit situation and ask them, is this your product? And you can report the seller to a U.S. government agency. There are different ones depending on the situation. If a product was unsafe, for instance, you can report it at saferproducts.gov. That's the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. For more information on reporting these, go to stopfakes.gov.

Now, I said this at the beginning of the episode. A lot of these tips can help you avoid unsafe products in general, not just counterfeits. Because even if something is not a counterfeit, like the seller is not pretending the product is coming from your favorite brand, it could still be illegitimate. Like, maybe it says your shampoo contains green tea extract, but actually, the only green thing in it is mold. Or you could buy some cheap no-name brand lighting for an outdoor party.

KAMMEL: So for example, we bought tent lighting, and we bought it from an ecommerce platform based here in the U.S. Decent amount of money, it was not cheap - we got two sets, and we went to plug them into the generator and they started sparking. So we called the generator company and they were like, these aren't even made for the U.S. market. This is made for a totally different electrical grid. So again, not counterfeit, but really dangerous. You know, we had to go find something else and, you know, find it from a brick and mortar store, which took a lot of driving around and phone calls, sort of old-school way. So sometimes it isn't as easy as, you know, it's all counterfeit. Sometimes it's a little more complicated, too. But how do we make the online space safer, regardless?

SEGARRA: OK, it's time for a recap. Takeaway one - whenever possible, if you're shopping online, buy directly from a brand that you trust on its website or through an ecommerce platform, but just make sure you actually are buying from the brand and not from the platform or from a third-party seller. Takeaway two - if you're shopping on an ecommerce platform and thinking about buying from a third-party seller, do some digging, see who you're actually buying from. Takeaway three, only get prescription medication from a licensed pharmacy. Fda.gov links to the pharmacy licensing databases for states and U.S. territories. You can click on yours and see if the pharmacy is listed. If not, the FDA says, do not use that pharmacy. Takeaway four - sometimes brick-and-mortar stores will sell counterfeits and unsafe products. Be careful of places where you're getting steep discounts that seem too good to be true. Takeaway five - if you think you bought a counterfeit or unsafe product online, stop using it and report it to the ecommerce platform. And you can report the seller to a U.S. government agency.

For more LIFE KIT, check out our other episodes. We have one on how to cut down on plastics in your life, and another on how to do CPR. You can find those at npr.org/lifekit. And if you love LIFE KIT and want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/lifekitnewsletter. Just a reminder that signing up for LIFE KIT Plus is a great way to support our show and public media, and you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/lifekit.

This episode of LIFE KIT was produced by Sylvie Douglis. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malaka Gharib. Meghan Keane is our supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andee Tagle, Clare Marie Schneider, and Margaret Cirino. Engineering support comes from Patrick Murray and David Greenburg. I'm Marielle Segarra. Thanks for listening.

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