In 2018, police showed up at a nondescript industrial warehouse in New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard to investigate reported counterfeits.
Federal agents were looking for knockoff military gear as part of an investigation into a distributor, called California Surplus, that had secured a $20 million contract to supply the U.S. military with specialized uniforms. They’d already recovered thousands of boxes of the stuff from a nearby New Jersey warehouse, according to court documents.
California Surplus, it turned out, was selling Chinese-made counterfeit goods designed to look like gear from one of the top military outfitters in America, Crye Precision. Crye’s Brooklyn headquarters happened to be located just around the block.
The owner of California Surplus, Ramin Kohanbash, and co-conspirator Bernard Klein pleaded guilty in 2019 to trafficking counterfeit goods and were given jail time.
Counterfeiting has ballooned into a massive problem for Crye, costing it millions of dollars a year, said Jonathan Antone, the company’s general counsel. Crye loses out on valuable sales to unlicensed mills overseas that print copies of its patented camouflage, called MultiCam, on ponchos, pants, shirts and hats that sell on Amazon and other marketplaces without Crye’s permission.
Crye Precision gave CNBC a tour of its warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, on August 7, 2024, where it tests suspected counterfeit items for authenticity.
Launched in 2000, Amazon’s marketplace allows businesses to hawk their goods on the company’s site. It’s amassed millions of sellers, and now accounts for more than half of Amazon’s overall retail sales volume. While the marketplace has helped Amazon bring in record revenue, it’s also been found to host counterfeit, unsafe and even expired goods.
Counterfeits became a more frequent problem on Amazon and across the internet as the pandemic supercharged online shopping, said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at advertising firm Publicis. And unlike brick-and-mortar stores, which may offer up to 150,000 products, online marketplaces like Amazon can carry hundreds of millions of items, Goldberg said. That vast selection can be harder for platforms to police.
“There’s a lot more space on that digital shelf for potential counterfeit products,” he added.
‘Disrupting and dismantling’ counterfeiters
Amazon has rolled out tools like Project Zero and Brand Registry that let brands report and remove suspected counterfeits themselves. In 2020, it launched an internal division , called the Counterfeit Crimes Unit, that partners with brands and law enforcement agencies to take on fraudsters.
The team, which now includes 35 people, is made up of data analysts, investigators and former federal prosecutors, many of whom previously worked for the Justice Department and FBI. Amazon recently invited CNBC to its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to learn more about how the CCU investigates counterfeits on the company’s marketplace.
Kebharu Smith, who heads up the CCU, said the division was launched at the request of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who was CEO until 2021. Bezos felt the company needed to have a team of former prosecutors and experts to “disrupt and dismantle” counterfeiting organizations, Smith said.
“Counterfeiting is an industry that totals around $500 billion in sales, and so we know that it’s going to take a coordinated effort among brands, law enforcement and partnerships with stakeholders to go after these bad actors at scale,” Smith said. “We’re not just focusing on the sellers in the Amazon store who we identify as bad actors, but the supply chain to knock out that network.”
In 2023, Amazon says it partnered with law enforcement around the world to seize 7 million counterfeit products and execute more than 50 raids, spending $1.2 billion and employing 15,000 people to make it happen.
Before the CCU’s launch, Amazon’s anti-counterfeit efforts were largely driven by its customer trust team, which oversees the company’s response to myriad abuse and fraud issues, like fake reviews and bad actors who look to skirt its policies .
Through the CCU, Amazon teams up with companies like Prada, Hanesbrands and Yeti to take counterfeiters to court. In March, it filed a lawsuit with Crye against six companies and 16 individuals allegedly involved in a scheme to sell knockoff versions of the equipment maker’s MultiCam product on Amazon’s marketplace. The items included camping, hunting and traveling bags and backpacks emblazoned with fake versions of Crye’s camouflage pattern.
An example of a backpack previously sold on Amazon that bore a fake version of Crye Precision’s MultiCam pattern.
Amazon
The CCU also passes leads on suspected bad actors to government agencies. In August 2023, federal agents from Homeland Security and the Department of Defense acted on information from Crye and Amazon to raid facilities in Texas and California. Agents seized “multiple tractor trailer loads” of counterfeit MultiCam products, estimated to be worth $8 million, according to court documents.
For many brands, the process of identifying counterfeits starts with conducting test purchases of products online.
“To the untrained eye, it might appear to be MultiCam, just as is our MultiCam, but it doesn’t look right to us,” Antone said. “So we will just order some test purchases and we’ll analyze them and often can almost immediately say this is easily counterfeit.”
Crye showed CNBC examples of counterfeit MultiCam products that were allegedly sold by retailer L&Q Tactical, one of the defendants in the lawsuit, on Amazon.Among the products were tactical vests, backpacks and plate carriers, which Crye identified as knockoffs due to inconsistencies in coloring with its MultiCam pattern. L&Q included the keyword “MultiCam” in some Amazon product listings even though they weren’t affiliated with Crye, listings show. L&Q didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“They were trying to bid on military contracts as well with these counterfeit items,” Ernesto Rodriguez, Crye’s MultiCam brand manager, said in an interview. “Fortunately for us, they don’t do a good job of trying to knock off our pattern.”
Crye Precision’s Ernesto Rodriguez shows off a genuine MultiCam backpack (left) and what he calls a “very bad knock-off” (right) in Brooklyn, New York, on August 7, 2024.
Fake backpacks, Apple chargers
When users post fake products on Amazon or elsewhere on the internet, they both threaten to damage a brand’s reputation and present a potential danger to consumers. In Crye’s case, counterfeit versions of its product could end up putting soldiers or police officers’ lives at risk, Rodriguez said. Crye tested the L&Q items with night vision goggles and found they wouldn’t properly conceal a soldier on a battlefield.
“When viewed under night vision, it’s glowing a solid white,” Rodriguez said. “So if a soldier was having this bag on his back or carrying it, it can be seen from miles away.”
The potential for counterfeits on Amazon has created friction with some brands. Over the years, brands including Birkenstock, Nike and Ikea have all quit selling directly on Amazon, pointing to counterfeits and the wild west nature of the marketplace.
Apple in 2016 sued an Amazon seller for selling fake chargers imprinted with its logo that it said “pose a significant risk of overheating, fire, and electrical shock.” Now a seller consultant, Rachel Greer worked in Amazon’s fraud and product safety departments from roughly 2007 to 2015. Around 2013, Greer recalls a case where a U.K. consumer died after being electrocuted from a knockoff Apple charger.
“[The charger] would plug in, sure,” Greer said in an interview. “But then it would zap you really hard because there was no insulation.”
Apple products are now a restricted category on Amazon, meaning resellers have to get approval from the brand to sell those products on the site. Amazon didn’t provide a comment on the U.K. incident. Smith said the company has identified bad actors who use fictitious IDs to set up accounts and sell in restricted, or “gated,” categories.
“We’ve identified schemes such as un-gating schemes, where bad actors will submit fake invoices as a way to get past our proactive tools,” Smith said.
Goldberg said that while counterfeits have become less prevalent on Amazon, “dupes,” or cheaper imitations of popular products, have become increasingly common. Roughly one-third of U.S. adults have intentionally bought a dupe, according to a 2023 Morning Consult study. Buying a knockoff isn’t as taboo as it was in the past, Goldberg said.
“Increasingly today, there are consumers that say, ‘Oh yes, I’m fiscally responsible and frugal. I would never buy that very expensive bag with a Coach logo on it, but I do like that aesthetic. And I was happy to find a bag without the Coach logo that had the same aesthetic on Temu for 10% of the cost,” he said.
Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop have become shopping destinations in the U.S. in recent years, luring American shoppers with their rock-bottom prices on clothing, electronics, home goods and other products. Much of the merchandise is unbranded products that are shipped direct from China.
Amazon has taken notice. The company is in the process of launching its own dedicated storefront for low-priced fashion and lifestyle items that will allow Chinese sellers to ship directly to U.S. consumers, CNBC previously reported. In an effort to remain competitive, the company has set caps on where sellers can price their goods, such as a $20 limit for couches and $9 for bedding sets, according to The Information.
The rise of online marketplaces has made it harder for companies to have “perfect brand safety,” Goldberg said.
“I would honestly characterize it as kind of the new reality in retail,” he added. “Consumers are discovering stuff on TikTok instead of on our store shelves and buying across all these platforms. The world is just more complicated and messy, and perfection is a further away goal than it ever was before.”
Watch the video for a behind-the-scenes look at how Amazon is fighting counterfeits.
Sanjay Beri, chief executive officer and founder of Netskope Inc., listens during a Bloomberg West television interview in San Francisco, California.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cloud security platform Netskope will go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK,” the company said in an initial public offering filing Friday.
The Santa Clara, California-based company said annual recurring revenue grew 33% to $707 million, while revenues jumped 31% to about $328 million in the first half of the year.
But Netskope isn’t profitable yet. The company recorded a $170 million net loss during the first half of the year. That narrowed from a $207 million loss a year ago.
Netskope joins an increasing number of technology companies adding momentum to the surge in IPO activity after high inflation and interest rates effectively killed the market.
So far this year, design software firm Figma more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut, while crypto firm Circle soared 168% in its first trading day. CoreWeave has also popped since its IPO, while trading app eToro surged 29% in its May debut.
Read more CNBC tech news
Netskope’s offering also coincides with a busy period for cybersecurity deals.
Founded in 2012, Netskope made a name for itself in its early years in the cloud access security broker space. The company lists Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Zscaler, Broadcom and Fortinet as its major competitors.
Netskope’s biggest backers include Accel, Lightspeed Ventures and Iconiq, which recently benefited from Figma’s stellar debut.
Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are leading the offering. Netskope listed 13 other Wall Street banks as underwriters.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta is planning to use its annual Connect conference next month to announce a deeper push into smart glasses, including the launch of the company’s first consumer-ready glasses with a display, CNBC has learned.
That’s one of the two new devices Meta is planning to unveil at the event, according to people familiar with the matter. The company will also launch its first wristband that will allow users to control the glasses with hand gestures, the people said.
Connect is a two-day conference for developers focused on virtual reality, AR and the metaverse. It was originally called Oculus Connect and obtained its current moniker after Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta in 2021.
The glasses are internally codenamed Hypernova and will include a small digital display in the right lens of the device, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
The device is expected to cost about $800 and will be sold in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the people said. CNBC reported in October that Meta was working with Luxottica on consumer glasses with a display.
Meta declined to comment. Luxottica, which is based in France and Italy, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Meta began selling smart glasses with Luxottica in 2021 when the two companies released the first-generation Ray-Ban Stories, which allowed users to take photos or videos using simple voice commands. The partnership has since expanded, and last year included the addition of advanced AI features that made the second generation of the product an unexpected hit with early adopters.
Luxottica owns a number of glasses brands, including Ray-Ban, and licenses many others like Prada. It’s unclear what brand Luxottica will use for the glasses with AR, but a Meta job listing posted this week said the company is looking for a technical program manager for its “Wearables organization,” which “is responsible for the Ray-Ban AR glasses and other wearable hardware.”
In June, CNBC reported that Meta and Luxottica plan to release Prada-branded smart glasses. Prada glasses are known for having thick frames and arms, which could make them a suitable option for the Hypernova device, one of the people said.
Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used Connect to showcase the company’s experimental Orion AR glasses.
The Orion features AR capabilities on both lenses, capable of blending 3D digital visuals into the physical world, but the device served only as a prototype to show the public what could be possible with AR glasses. Still, Orion built some positive momentum for Meta, which since late 2020 has endured nearly $70 billion in losses from its Reality Labs unit that’s in charge of building hardware devices.
With Hypernova, Meta will finally be offering glasses with a display to consumers, but the company is setting low expectations for sales, some of the sources said. That’s because the device requires more components than its voice-only predecessors, and will be slightly heavier and thicker, the people said.
Meta and Ray-Ban have sold 2 million pairs of their second-generation glasses since 2023, Luxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said in February. In July, Luxottica said that revenue from sales of the smart glasses had more than tripled year over year.
As part of an extension agreement between Meta and Luxottica announced in September, Meta obtained a stake of about 3% in the glasses company according to Bloomberg. Meta also gets exclusive rights to Luxottica’s brands for its smart glasses technology for a number of years, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC in June.
Although Hypernova will feature a display, those visual features are expected to be limited, people familiar with the matter said. They said the color display will offer about a 20 degree field of view — meaning it will appear in a small window in a fixed position — and will be used primarily to relay simple bits of information, such as incoming text messages.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s technology chief, said earlier this month that there are advantages to having just one display rather than two, including a lower price.
“Monocular displays have a lot going for them,” Bosworth said in an Instagram video. “They’re affordable, they’re lighter, and you don’t have disparity correction, so they’re structurally quite a bit easier.”
‘Interact with an AI assistant’
Other details of Meta’s forthcoming glasses were disclosed in a July letter from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to a lawyer representing Meta. While the letter redacted the name of the company and the product, a person with knowledge of the matter confirmed that it was in reference to Meta’s Hypernova glasses.
“This model will enable the user to take and share photos and videos, make phone calls and video calls, send and receive messages, listen to audio playback and interact with an AI assistant in different forms and methods, including voice, display, and manual interactions,” according to the letter, dated July 23.
The letter from CBP was part of routine communication between companies and the U.S. government when determining the country of origin for a consumer product. It refers to the product as “New Smart Glasses,” and says the device will feature “a lens display function that allows the user to interface with visual content arising from the Smart Features, and components providing image data retrieval, processing, and rendering capabilities.”
CBP didn’t provide a comment for this story.
The Hypernova glasses will also come paired with a wristband that will use technology built by Meta’s CTRL Labs, said people familiar with the matter. CTRL Labs, which Meta acquired in 2019, specializes in building neural technology that could allow users to control computing devices using gestures in their arms.
The wristband is expected to be a key input component for the company’s future release of full AR glasses, so getting data now with Hypernova could improve future versions of the wristband, the people said. Instead of using camerasensors to track body movements, as with Apple’s Vision Pro headset, Meta’s wristband uses so-called sEMG sensortechnology, which reads and interprets the electrical signals from hand movements.
One of the challenges Meta has faced with the wristband involves how people choose to wear it, a person familiar with the product’s development said. If the device is too loose, it won’t be able to read the user’s electrical signals as intended, which could impact its performance, the person said. Also, the wristband has run into issues in testing related to which arm it’s worn on, how it works on men versus women and how it functions on people who wear long sleeves.
The CTRL Labs team published a paper in Nature in July about its wristband, and Meta wrote about it in a blog post. In the paper, the Meta team detailed its use of machine learning technology to make the wristband work with as many people as possible. The additional data collected by the upcoming device should improve those capabilities for future Meta smart glasses.
“We successfully prototyped an sEMG wristband with Orion, our first pair of true augmented reality (AR) glasses, but that was just the beginning,” Meta wrote in the post. “Our teams have developed advanced machine learning models that are able to transform neural signals controlling muscles at the wrist into commands that drive people’s interactions with the glasses, eliminating the need for traditional—and more cumbersome—forms of input.”
Bloomberg reported the wristband component in January.
Meta has recently started reaching out to developers to begin testing both Hypernova and the accompanying wristband, people familiar with the matter said. The company wants to court third-party developers, particularly those who specialize in generative AI, to build experimental apps that Meta can showcase to drum up excitement for the smart glasses, the people said.
In addition to Hypernova and the wristband, Meta will also announce a third-generation of its voice-only smart glasses with Luxottica at Connect, one person said.
That device was also referenced by CBP in its July letter, referring to it as “The Next Generation Smart Glasses.” The glasses will include “components that provide capacitive touch functionality, allowing users to interact with the Smart Glasses through touch gestures,” the letter said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images
Alphabet shares rose on a Friday report that Apple is in early discussions to use Google’s Gemini AI models for an updated version of the iPhone-maker’s Siri assistant.
The company’s shares rose more than 3% on the Bloomberg report, which said Apple recently inquired of Google about the potential for the search giant to build a custom AI model that would power a new Siri that could launch next year. Google’s flagship AI models Gemini have consistently been atop key benchmarks for artificial intelligence advancements while Apple has struggled to define its own AI strategy.
The reported talks come as Google faces potential risk to its lucrative search deals with Apple. This month, a U.S. judge is expected to rule on the penalties for Google’s alleged search monopoly, in which the Department of Justice recommending eliminating exclusionary agreements with third parties. For Google, that refers to its search position on Apple’s iPhone and Samsung devices — deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts.
The Android maker has said its Gemini models will become the default assistant on Android phones. Google this year has showed Gemini doing capabilities that go beyond Siri’s capabilities, such as summarizing videos.
Craig Federighi, who oversees Apple’s operating systems, said at last year’s developer conference that the iPhone maker would like to add other AI models for specific purposes into its Apple Intelligence framework. Federighi specifically mentioned Google, whose Gemini can now hold conversations with users and handle input that comes from photos, videos, voice or text. Apple is also exploring partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI as it tried to renew its AI roadmap, according to a June Bloomberg report.
Documents revealed during Google’s remedy trial showed executives from Apple were involved in the negotiations over using Google’s Gemini for a potential search option.