Bob Mackin
The week before the FIFA World Cup kicks off, the Toronto Police Service (TPS) says it scored the “largest known seizure of counterfeit soccer jerseys in Canadian history.”
But it is not the first fake operation to piggyback on a major international sporting event in Canada.
Toronto Police Service shows-off items from a Mississauga anti-counterfeit bust. (TPS/YouTube)
TPS said June 1 that it searched the Amana Trading warehouse in Mississauga on May 26 and found 16,000 fraudulent jerseys and flags worth $3.5 million. The items purported to be FIFA, Nike, Adidas and Puma-branded. Ramy Jaber, 41, of Milton, Ont., and Walid Sarhan, 62, of Mississauga, were charged with fraud over $5,000, possession of property obtained by crime over $5,000 and intent to deceive. Next court date is Aug. 17.
Toronto lawyer Lorne Lipkus’s intellectual property firm received a tip about Amana and reported it to TPS. The company has been on Lipkus’s radar for a while. He represented New Era Cap LLC in a 2024 Federal Court trademark infringement filing against Jaber, Khuloud Hamdallah and Sports United, which is related to Amana.
Vancouver 2010
Lipkus was also involved in battling counterfeiting around the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Back in 2010, there were 1,500 shipments representing 16,000 counterfeit, mostly Team Canada jerseys intercepted by the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency over two weeks at the Vancouver mail processing plant. The haul was more than $2.3 million.
Dale Ptycia, the senior manager of licensing for Hockey Canada, testified to the House of Commons standing committee on industry, science and technology in November 2013.
“We estimated that less than 10% to 20% was intercepted of the actual number of counterfeit jerseys imported into Canada leading up to and during the Games,” Ptycia told the committee. “This translates into more than 250,000 jerseys that were imported into Canada, with a retail value of over $32.5 million—all lost revenue, which negatively impacts Hockey Canada.”
In the Toronto soccer case, it is about one company importing goods and distributing them to retailers.
“Generally the goods like this come from Asia, and not solely from China, but the majority of it from China, and I wouldn’t expect this would be any different,” Lipkus told theBreaker. “It is not likely made in Canada. I can also tell you, that in the last several months we’ve seen a huge uptick in counterfeit soccer jerseys being imported into Canada and being sold in Canada. So the fact that we now have a seizure by the police of this size is not something that is surprising. There’s just so much money to be made.”
Toronto anti-counterfeit lawyer Lorne Lipkus. (Lipkus Law)
Evolution
Lipkus said counterfeiting has evolved since Vancouver 2010 due to technology and consumer trends. Fewer national retail chains selling legitimate products. More online retailers. Some of them with ill intent.
“Where we had flea markets before, we now have the Internet, and the Internet is more than just the flea market of the present or the flea market of the future,” Lipkus said. “It’s a much more sophisticated and easier way to do business.”
Lipkus said scammers are using artificial intelligence to create fraudulent online sales channels. But investigators are also using AI to catch scammers quicker.
“Our firm has four full-time online investigators, and almost every brand we represent —and we represent over 200 brands — and I would say most of them or all have people helping them online, because that’s where the sales are taking place, and a lot of the counterfeits are taking place. Not only in marketplaces, like Temu and Amazon, you can name all of them, they all have to be checked very carefully. They may have vendors, but they have very sophisticated programs to allow brands to take down the advertisements, to prevent the sale of counterfeits of their product from various sellers. So it’s evolved in that way.”
Why it matters
Generally, counterfeiting of licensed clothing often involves the use of sweatshop labour, money laundering and tax evasion. It is too early to tell in this case.
Clothing knockoffs can even pose danger to consumers, due to toxic or flammable materials.
The European Union Intellectual Property Office and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimated in 2021 that the global market for counterfeit sportswear was worth almost $725 billion.
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