The Influencers Getting Paid to Promote Designer Knockoffs From China
Influencers on TikTok and Reddit earn a cut of the counterfeit goods trade by promoting high-quality “replicas” sourced from ecommerce sites in China.
LOUISE MATSAKIS
BUSINESS
MAR 10, 2024 5:30 AM
The Influencers Getting Paid to Promote Designer Knockoffs From China
Influencers on TikTok and Reddit earn a cut of the counterfeit goods trade by promoting high-quality “replicas” sourced from ecommerce sites in China.
ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES
Eben Fox makes it sound like the best shopping hack in the world. In a since-deleted TikTok video, the sneaker influencer gushed to his 120,000 followers about a relatively obscure ecommerce website called Pandabuy.
“Everything is so cheap that you’re going to get instantly addicted,” said Fox, who goes by the online moniker Cedaz. “Imagine every single shoe or every single piece of clothing that you could never get because it’s so expensive is now obtainable for like 20 to 50 bucks.” There’s just one catch: Nearly all of the items appear to be fake.
A wave of social media influencers are earning money by promoting illegal knockoffs imported from China on Facebook, TikTok, Discord, and Reddit. Pandabuy alone claims to have signed up thousands of content creators to its marketing program last year. They serve as the public face of an elaborate new counterfeiting economy that is proving difficult for tech platforms to combat and makes the dealers of Manhattan’s Canal Street look downright primitive. It works by connecting Western buyers to Pandabuy and other fast-growing Chinese sites that act as a go-between for shopping marketplaces stuffed with fakes usually sold only inside China. In exchange for promoting the platforms, the influencers earn a cut of each sale.
In December, Nike sued Fox, accusing him of working with Pandabuy to market counterfeit versions of its shoes. His lawyer, Joe Southern, says Fox disagrees with the allegations but is working to resolve the case. WIRED’s questions to Pandabuy were directed to a customer service agent identified only as Yaya, who said the company doesn’t have the expertise to authenticate the products it lists.
“I’m talking any brand, any designer brand that you might like and you think their shyt is too expensive, then just buy it from here,” one influencer who shares Pandabuy links says in a TikTok video. “The leather is so good,” another creator tells the camera while holding up a fake black Yves Saint Laurent purse. “This feels, like, real.”
The influencers working with Pandabuy and similar sites peddle everything from fake Chanel badminton sets and Skims dresses to counterfeit Stanley cups, sharing links to listings that let the ecommerce sites track orders and pay them commission. WIRED investigated how the ecosystem works by examining retailers’ websites, documents shared in private Discord servers, and videos and spreadsheets available publicly online. Some influencers in the trade promote bootleg copies of self-help books, like Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money. One offered a “vintage” fake Chanel bag that had water stains on it to make the purse look older. Fox has even touted knockoff Ferrari car keys, suggesting in one TikTok video they could be used to impress someone on a first date.
TikTok’s advertising rules and community guidelines prohibit promoting counterfeits. The company says it suspended the accounts of several influencers after WIRED brought them to its attention. “We continuously enforce strict rules against counterfeit products, invest heavily in detection and reporting, and provide an IP Protection Center for brands,” TikTok spokesperson Mahsau Cullinane said in a statement.
Daniel Shapiro, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Red Points, a firm that helps brands detect counterfeits of their products online, says that almost any item can now be quickly copied, and smaller companies are increasingly seeing their designs get ripped off. The fakes he is referring to aren’t “dupes,” a term often used for goods that only resemble another product and have their own branding, but rather carefully crafted clones termed “replicas” that trade on other companies’ registered trademarks and intellectual property.
Overall, counterfeit and pirated goods account for an estimated 2.5 percent of global trade annually, according to a study coauthored by the European Union Intellectual Property Office and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Facebook and Instagram are of the most popular channels for buying fakes: A survey of shoppers in 17 countries last year found that 68 percent of people who bought a knockoff on social media did so on Facebook. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, did not return requests for comment.
Chinese sites, with help from influencers, appear to be growing fast. At a hearing earlier this month held by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission—a federal body that scrutinizes trade with China—Shapiro said that Red Points detected a 26 percent increase in counterfeiting by Chinese sellers in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Order Confirmed
To get a sense of how influencers are luring consumers in the US and Europe to buy fakes directly from China, consider a hypothetical counterfeit pair of Rick Owens designer sneakers, which typically retail for more than $1,000.
When an influencer notices a particular Rick Owens shoe is going viral on TikTok or other platforms, they can search for knockoffs on sites known as shipping agent services, one of the most popular of which is Pandabuy. They offer a portal into the vibrant and chaotic world of Chinese ecommerce marketplaces usually accessible only to consumers in China. One of the largest is Taobao, an Alibaba-owned app whose eccentric catalog became so notorious that an entire magazine was founded to chronicle its “weird, wonderful underbelly.”
Pandabuy scrapes millions of product listings from Taobao and other Chinese marketplaces, translates them into English, and offers them up to foreign audiences. Data from the market research firm Similarweb shows that Pandabuy’s website was visited over 17 million times in January. The site allows content creators to sign up to become one of its affiliate marketing partners, meaning they can earn money by referring their friends and followers to make purchases. The most elite influencers in the program have access to an invite-only Telegram channel, where Pandabuy shares upcoming sales events and tips for polishing their content.
