Using AI To Tackle the Rising Threat of Counterfeiting and Brand Abuse in E-Commerce

By Timmi K. Rysgaard, Brand Protection, Product Owner 

 

Counterfeit goods are on the rise. The most recent figures from a 2025 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study reported that the global trade in fake goods has reached $467 billion dollars. Current global economic uncertainty and inflation have led to consumers increasingly turning to fake products when items become too expensive. AI is accelerating and scaling the rise of counterfeit goods, and at INTA 2026, this topic was high on the agenda.  

 

How AI Is Supercharging the Counterfeit Market in E-Commerce 

The shift in consumer spending habits and the acceleration of digital technology has caused a movement from physical stores selling counterfeit goods to online marketplaces. According to a recent report, 83% of the online counterfeiting trade now takes place via social and e-commerce channels, up from 64% in 2015. Coupled with the rapid evolution of AI, this creates a perfect storm that requires brands to adapt to protect their reputation, customer confidence, and ultimately, their revenue. 

While AI has presented opportunities for brands to accelerate growth, it has also opened avenues for bad actors to exploit. This has made it easier than ever to produce and market counterfeit goods quickly and on a large scale through methods such as: 

• AI-generated clone websites and domains: Criminals no longer need to understand code to establish an online presence. With generative AI, they can recreate websites, images, marketing copy, and nearly identical domain names almost instantly. 

• Design reproduction: Counterfeiters use generative AI to analyze high-resolution images of authentic products. This allows them to create precise templates for logos, fonts, and laser markings. 

• AI-generated listings: AI allows criminals to generate thousands of unique, customized fraudulent listings in minutes, taking a good template and quickly adding variations of it to avoid clustering analyses. 

• Using AI to market counterfeit goods: Generative AI is giving criminals numerous tools to market their products, using tactics like:  

• • AI-generated imagery 

• • Fake reviews 

• • Deepfake influencer and celebrity endorsements 

Add VPN and anonymization tools that make it harder than ever to trace perpetrators to the mix, and you have an environment where bad actors can operate at an industrial scale with minimal exposure.  

 

The barriers to entry for counterfeiting have never been lower, while the stakes for brands have never been higher. 

 

The Rise of Social Commerce is Making the Issue Harder to Police 

Marketplaces were already a significant enforcement challenge due to the rise of AI, and social commerce adds another layer of complexity. 

Platforms like TikTok Shop have opened commercial channels with far less regulatory oversight than established e-commerce giants. Fake fashion brands, already indistinguishable from legitimate ones at first glance, appear on social platforms like Instagram. They communicate entirely through direct messages (DMs) before moving conversations off the platform to avoid detection. These operations take place without a formal storefront, no formal checks, and almost no meaningful monitoring.  

An account can be set up instantly. Sales begin immediately. By the time action is taken, the seller has moved on. 

Most counterfeit goods are shipped by post, making it exceptionally difficult for customs or postal authorities to distinguish them from the billions of legitimate parcels sent every day. The most effective intervention takes place further up the supply chain, targeting criminals at source. For this approach to be successful, the responsibility falls on brands, legal teams, and the platforms themselves to work together.  

 

Marketplaces and Brands Are Taking Action - But it Isn’t Enough 

 

Some of the major platforms are deploying significant resources already. Amazon, for example, uses AI to scan 8 billion items daily, flagging suspected counterfeits before they reach consumers. That is a meaningful commitment, and it has an impact.  

 

Regulatory bodies are also taking steps. The UKIPO recently published updated guidelines for Protecting Intellectual Property Rights on E-Commerce stores, and the European Union is set to roll out its Digital Product Passport (DPP) imminently. These developments will see digital fingerprints created that trace product authenticity through supply chains – a development that will help, particularly in regulated categories.   

And brands themselves are investing. As discussed in Managing IP’s Future of fashion: technological tools to combat counterfeiting article luxury houses, including Prada and Cartier, have experimented with blockchain-based authentication to create unforgeable provenance records, and manufacturers are building physical features into products that are harder to replicate.  

These are genuine advances, but none of them are sufficient on their own. Blockchain adoption remains expensive, excluding smaller brands from adopting. Physical anti-counterfeiting measures raise the cost of replication without eliminating it. Platform-side monitoring, however sophisticated, cannot catch everything – particularly on the newer, less-regulated social commerce channels where enforcement is still nascent. 

The gap between the speed of infringement and the speed of response remains wide. 

 

Why Manual Processes Are Failing In-House Teams – and Creating an Opening for Law Firms 

For in-house brand protection and IP teams, the volume of work – caused by a proliferation of counterfeit goods – has become unmanageable. Infringement monitoring and enforcement used to mean watching a defined set of markets and platforms. Now it means tracking a rapidly shifting landscape of e-commerce sites, marketplaces, social accounts, and resale platforms – across jurisdictions, in multiple languages, at a scale that grows faster than headcount can.  

The result is a scattergun approach: teams reacting to the most visible infringements and focusing resources on the wrong places, rather than being strategic and acting where it will have the most impact.  

This is creating a structural shift in how brand protection is delivered, and where law firms sit within it. Brand abuse used to be a specialist problem for large consumer companies, now it’s a daily risk for almost every brand, in every sector, at a volume human teams struggle to monitor manually. This increased volume means the work is recurring, not reactive. The threats are relentless, making brand protection an ongoing program rather than a one-off engagement. 

Most in-house teams lack the resources to handle the increased workload. They lack the tools to detect it, the processes to track it, and critically, the legal expertise to act on it. As a result, clients are increasingly turning to external counsel for help with not only enforcement actions, but also the broader challenge of monitoring and prioritization. 

As I explored in my recent blog ‘How AI-Driven Brand Abuse is Reshaping Brand Protection for Law Firms’, law firms are increasingly becoming central to brand protection workflows. While detection tools can spot infringements, deciding what to enforce, in which jurisdiction, against which target, and with what risk appetite – that requires legal judgment. Clients need counsel who can convert monitoring data into action. 

That’s a significant opportunity.  

But it comes with a significant challenge: if demand is rising and the infringement landscape is accelerating, manual processes at law firms will hit the same wall that in-house teams already have. 

 

AI Is the Answer – If It’s Used Well 

The same technology that enables faster counterfeiting also creates the tools needed to fight it. 

Here’s what that looks like in practice: 

• Trademark watch that actually scales: AI-based similarity scoring changes the economics of watching trademarks by prioritizing the most relevant conflicts, therefore reducing irrelevant results. Trademark Watch orders can be created directly from trademark records, eliminating duplicate data entry and speeding time to protection. 

• AI-powered image detection that keeps pace with counterfeiters: Visual brand abuse – fake products, cloned packaging, and unauthorized use of brand imagery – requires a response that operates at the same speed as the problem. AI-powered image recognition can scan marketplaces, social platforms, and the broader web continuously, flagging unauthorized use of brand assets and triggering enforcement workflows automatically.  

• Faster takedowns with higher accuracy: Speed matters. Every day a counterfeit listing is live is a day that brand reputation erodes, revenue is diverted, and consumers are exposed to potential harm. AI-powered case management and complaint generation cuts the time between detection and action, and the accuracy of AI-assisted identification reduces the false positives that slow enforcement down and damage relationships with marketplaces.  

 

Novel Approaches Worth Watching  

Where new problems arise, novel solutions always present themselves – and the area of brand protection is no exception. Osmo AI, for example, has developed sensors that authenticate products by reading their unique scent signature. This approach is difficult to replicate and opens new possibilities for physical product verification. These tools are at an early stage, but they illustrate the direction of travel: authentication that operates at a level of sophistication of counterfeiters cannot easily match.  

 

The Firms That Act Now Will Define the Standard 

The counterfeit threat in e-commerce is real; it is growing, and it is being accelerated by the same AI tools that can be used to fight it. Brands are taking steps, marketplaces are investing, and regulators are beginning to act. But the pace of infringement is still faster than the pace of response.  

For law firms, the opportunity is clear. Clients need partners who can operate at scale, prioritize intelligently, and move quickly.  

Manual workflows cannot deliver that. AI-powered platforms can. 

Law firms that integrate these tools now – building the capability to monitor, prioritize, and act at the speed the market demands – will define brand protection in the years ahead. The ones that don’t will find themselves left behind.  

 

Watch our recent brand protection webinar to see AI-powered brand protection in action. AI in Brand Protection: Moving Faster Without Losing Control - Anaqua IP Management Software and Services 

 

 

Want To Find Out More? 

• Watch the video: https://vimeo.com/1188458009/6e5d80c482?fl=ip&fe=ec 

• Reach out to book a demo and explore what Anaqua’s platform can do for your firm today.