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Buy a fake, risk death, support slavery – says bike industry

Buy a fake and you’re risking your life and supporting organised crime, according to bike industry body

If you buy a counterfeit bike on an internet site like Alibaba, you not only run the risk of injury or even death, you could also be supporting organised crime like drug trafficking and prostitution, says the World Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry (WFSGI). The problem of counterfeits in the bike industry has become so great that fakes might even be finding their way into local bike shops.

According to Robbert de Kock (above), Secretary General of the WFSGI, “It is since many years the WFSGI’s aim to tackle counterfeits, as it represents both a severe threat to the health and safety of the consumer and a huge loss for the image, the goodwill and the business related to the trademarks and products of our members.”

The counterfeits being spoken about are bikes and other cycling products that are passed off as the creations of big brands like Shimano, FSA, Specialized, Zipp, and so on.

In a presentation by the WFSGI to members of the bike industry at Taipei Cycle last week, Michele Provera (below), Vice President of Internet Brand Protection at Convey, a company that specialises in internet brand protection, said, “We’re not dealing with sweatshop factories, we’re dealing with very sophisticated organisations who launder money they gain from drug dealing, from prostitution, from slavery.

“They invest this money into selling counterfeit products because it gives them huge profit margins. They have no R&D costs, they save everything that was invested by the legitimate brand.

The WFSGI has teamed up with Convey to combat internet-related counterfeits. The objectives of the project include (in the WFSGI's own words):

• To discover and analyse the existing online threats for… brands covering domain name abuses, illegal offerings and counterfeit product sales on third-party operated online platforms.

• To remove counterfeit offerings from the major e-commerce platforms and online marketplaces and to permanently banish the respective operators and sellers.

• To shut down rogue websites and regain control of abusive domain names used and registered by third-party operators.

The WFSGI and Convey believe that the internet provides counterfeiters with the ideal platform to exploit bike brands because they can sell fake goods on e-commerce platforms and create counterfeit online shops with domain names that lead consumers to believe they are legitimate sellers. They can also highjack websites, divert traffic, and post videos, ads and links to counterfeit shops on major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest.

Convey says that the problem could be about to get worse with new gTLDs – generic top level domains – giving counterfeiters the opportunity to confuse consumers with legitimate-sounding web addresses like www.shimano.sport, www.giant.store, www.cervelo.bike, and so on. Trademark holders – the brands – get preferential treatment in securing these gTLDs. They can also recover a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to their trademark or has been registered by somebody with no legitimate interest, but that does take time and money.

Convey says that fakes on Western marketplaces like ebay and Amazon are just the tip of the iceberg. Chinese e-commerce platforms are the main source of counterfeits: sites like Alibaba and AliExpress. That said, we shouldn’t be complacent if we buy from more mainstream sources.

“We are seeing that more and more buyers are not just purchasing one piece for their own bike, they are purchasing hundreds of pieces of the same product,” said Michele Provera.

“This means that they resell them in Western marketplaces or, worse, they can maybe have a local bike shop and – who knows? – start to mix the counterfeits with real ones. If someone buys one of these products and the next day the frame breaks, what could the consequences be? If you’re lucky, the guy will [just] complain on all the forums, and social media… but there could also be liability problems.”

The project is in its early stages but the WFSGI and Convey say that they have attacked hundreds of counterfeiters, removed 21,000 fake products from sale, and blocked 5,000 annual transactions with an estimated value in excess of €1 million.

Mat has been in cycling media since 1996, on titles including BikeRadar, Total Bike, Total Mountain Bike, What Mountain Bike and Mountain Biking UK, and he has been editor of 220 Triathlon and Cycling Plus. Mat has been road.cc technical editor for over a decade, testing bikes, fettling the latest kit, and trying out the most up-to-the-minute clothing. We send him off around the world to get all the news from launches and shows too. He has won his category in Ironman UK 70.3 and finished on the podium in both marathons he has run. Mat is a Cambridge graduate who did a post-grad in magazine journalism, and he is a winner of the Cycling Media Award for Specialist Online Writer. Now over 50, he's riding road and gravel bikes most days for fun and fitness rather than training for competitions.

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80 comments

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joemmo | 10 years ago
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Buying fakes and buying legitimate gear online are very different things regardless of how they might affect your job security. The pros and cons of online shopping are a completely different argument.

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jason.timothy.jones | 10 years ago
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How did this turn from an advisory article to an attack on a particular brand that once sponsored one of many hundreds (if not thousands) of cheaters...Oh that's right we are on the internet  102 . (as a side note, I have a particularly high level of hate for Armstrong for personal reasons)

I have to agree with the Trek Lady, and I suggest some of you need to listen to what she said on Velo Cast (I think it was velo cast) first before making further digs. Furthermore if we stopped buying products from companies that sponsored cheats the whole industry would collapse and we would be getting around on roller skates.

I have been a victim of counterfeit products, and I tell you its heart wrenching when your item arrives after months of saving and scraping only to find its a cheap knock off.

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Nick T | 10 years ago
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Same thing happened to Schwinn with Giant.

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edster99 | 10 years ago
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It's worth reminding people occasionally that cheap knock off goods subscribe to the rule of 'theres no such thing as a free lunch' - someone ends up paying, be it the employees in crap conditions, the intellectual property owners, or the end consumers.

Ironically, we are conditioned to want want want by the very companies that are complaining about people buying the counterfeit versions of their goods.

It doesn't make it right to buy those knock-off goods, but as a society we want everything now, and the big brands add their weight to that.

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Grizzerly | 10 years ago
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Carbon frame manufacture is not a cottage industry. Even under sweatshop conditions, it would be more expensive to make counterfeit frames than to buy mass produced frames at the factory gate. The vast majority of branded frames come out of a small number of factories in the Far East and are re-badged by the suppliers. The 'counterfeiters' simply rip-off the branding. If you buy an un-branded frame, or a lesser known brand, it will have come from the same factories but you are not paying for a name. Perhaps the answer is to buy your frame and components separately and build your own bike from scratch.

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velotech_cycling | 10 years ago
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There are two sides to this whole question - one is about the actual technologies that may be found in fake frames and the economics of their manufacture - that's the area in which I have some knowledge.

The other is the legal and quasi-legal question about how buying products branded to a company but which have no provenance from that company - these are also moral questions - and in these areas I can only comment that I abhor fakes as they are theft, for all of the reasons outlined in many of the posts above.

On the materials side of life, though ...This an old, old debate when it comes to composites.

The plain fact of the matter is, until it fails, the only guy or guys who knows what was under the pretty composite skin and the paintwork, is the dude or dudes who put it there. It's extremely difficult to determine the exact composition of these types of product post-manufacture. Of course, if the design and manufacturing are done correctly and useage is within the specified purpose & limits of the item, only a fraction of a percentage of the production are ever likely to fail ... and then, it is yet more unlikely that the failure will be catastrophic, as correct design addresses this.

The bigger producers, making under contract to the Treks, Specializeds and Pinarellos of this world will have QC staff from within those companies looking over their shoulders with great attention to ensure that their design and manufacturing criteria are followed. The shop floor will actively feed back in these areas, too. These QC and compliance guys will also do their best to prevent knock-offs appearing from out-of-life or otherwise unsatisfactory moulds or through any other source / route.

These guys are not omniscient however, so we do see, from time to time, fakes of many very good products (and it's not just frames), made with very questionable lay-up schedules, from material that may and may not have been correctly stored for indeterminate periods of time ... and the processing in terms of exactly how the product has then been autoclaved, purged of excess resin etc may and may not have followed the original designer's schedules.

With the advent of 3D printing, there are even ways, now, in which access to a mould can be drastically cut cost-wise BUT ... the structural integrity of a composite product is a function of shape, material and lay-up ... so failures in copies, as they may be deficient in one or more of these areas, are, relatively-speaking, common.

How do I know this? I've seen frames fail and sawn them up and looked at the jointing techniques - these were definitely NOT out of any credible factory, certainly not the one that they purported to come from. I have seen others where a simple volume and displacement test (never mind the evidence of my own eyes) showed to have very high percentages of glass fibre and I have seen catastrophic failure that could not happen were the lay-up schedules as prescribed by the frame's original designer followed.

Yes, all manufacturers will test the envelope with retail price - but understand this - they are businesses and it is their job to make as much money for their shareholders as they can, whilst holding onto their intellectual property, reputation and customer base in the process.

Frame manufacture if it is done correctly, no matter what the material, is no licence to print money - the bigger brands know this and manage their profitability to give an acceptable overall ROI whilst creating, through sponsorship and other marketing channels, the aspiration to own their product. What the knock-offs do is to undermine this as well as potentially (and that is one thing that has to be stressed) endangering life and limb.

If your "Brand Whatever" frame fails due to manufacturing or material defect and puts you in a wheelchair, you may have some comeback. Good luck to you if it's a copy ...

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Skylark | 10 years ago
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This article presupposes several premises but fails to state them explicitly.

1. That the products refer to the High-End bike/frame/wheel market. Typically carbon products.

2. That the buyer is looking for value (a deal perhaps) and opting to spend the least amount possible.

OK, fair enough. It's possible to have a good bike with moderate modification by simple and effective adaption of an Entry-Level platform. The utmost High-End market is a newly "invented phenomenon" which has seen unreasonable price escalations.

Equipment failure is a possibility across an entire spectrum of products regardless of the back-end reputation of the fabricator. Once goods pass into third-party hands, discorded from history or maintenance logs/schedules/procedures or mere unwitting abuse, the reliability of the product becomes a toss-up.

Bold claim though to link Alibaba to Money Laundering et al.

Basically, get a cheap bike and be happy with it.

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Giles Pargiter | 10 years ago
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Great to see that at least some people supply good bicycles at a reasonable price.
About the only "R&D" the labelled manufacturers have done in the last fifteen years is to work out how to get more people to buy sub-standard, cheaply made, expensively sold, short lasting, throw away crap full of so called "developments" that do nothing at all for ride quality or enjoyment - or indeed racing times (check out the non-improvement in Tdf times from 1960 to the present).

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LinusLarrabee replied to jason.timothy.jones | 10 years ago
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jason.timothy.jones wrote:

How did this turn from an advisory article to an attack on a particular brand that once sponsored one of many hundreds (if not thousands) of cheaters...Oh that's right we are on the internet  102 . (as a side note, I have a particularly high level of hate for Armstrong for personal reasons)

Sorry, it wasn't meant to be an attack on a particular brand. As I tried to stress, I was pointing out the hypocrisy of an industry body claiming consumers might be supporting organised crime if they don't buy from an industry that has previously supported teams and athletes that have been involved in illegal activities. That's the long and short of it. As I also stressed several times, I don't support or condone counterfeit goods and would never buy them myself.

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swiftsquirrell | 10 years ago
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Yea sorry as someone that works in the bike trade, people that buy fakes and everything online aren't helping the trade or my job.

Seems a bit harsh but if you knowingly buy a fake and it has a fault, you won't get any sympathy from me, in fact you won't get any of my time either.

We are in a society nowadays that what's the best of everything and we don't want to pay for it. If you want the £5000 dream bike but you only have £2000 don't buy a fake just be more realistic and buy what you can afford from someone that loves bikes and who will look after you in the future

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belgravedave | 10 years ago
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Well said mythbuster and LinusLarrabee, nothing worse than industry groups treating the public like morons.
On a more positive note look at the effect counterfeiting had on the price of DVDs.

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themartincox | 10 years ago
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ah, I misread the title. I thought he was asking us to buy a fake bike and support slavery. got it. my bad.

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noether | 10 years ago
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All the comments posted lead to the same conclusion: the marketplace works pretty well, everyone seems to be able to purchase a product that fits his/her needs/lust at his/her price point. In fact, the choice available in bikes, components and clothing is bewildering and so are the materials used. I personally ride a titanium bike: make bikes, not bombs!
Counterfeit destroys the marketplace: gone is the choice, gone is the development, GONE IS THE SAFETY, GONE IS THE VALUE FOR MONEY.
Counterfeit is a lose lose situation: consumers lose out, counterfeiters lose out (there is always a cheaper one).
The marketplace ensures continuing development, 99% to the advantage of the consumer. I still ride my 1980's steel Giant bike, completely original, a magnificently comfortable ride, but I cannot get it up the mountains...
The marketplace funds athletes and the grand spectacle of sports inspires millions of people (I keep my distance because of the secret race).
The marketplace is flexible, adaptable, responds to changing perceptions, corrects excesses over time.
And above all the marketplace, through amazingly complex mechanisms, improves products by making them lighter, stronger and cheaper, in one word: safer.
The marketplace, complete with its forest of regulations and legal protection of brands and but also brand liabilities, is the place I want to be.
Counterfeit has no place in it, because counterfeit destroys it from within.

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Flying Scot | 10 years ago
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I don't care that my frame was built in a smoky hell hole of a sweat shop, with appalling conditions, zero health and safety, and for slave wages of pennies an hour.

Because in 1953, that's the way all bikes were made in Glasgow!

Like the a Trek man says, potentially a frame lasts a lifetime, even the most confident rider must occasionally worry that their chervelo, chinarello or whatever might not be up to that big descent.......especially after that pothole....was that a creak or did I imagine that......

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TrekBikesUK replied to Flying Scot | 10 years ago
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Flying Scot wrote:

Like the a Trek man says...

Or Trek woman.  3

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Flying Scot replied to | 10 years ago
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TrekBikesUK wrote:
Flying Scot wrote:

Like the a Trek man says...

Or Trek woman.  3

trek person then!  16

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Nick T | 10 years ago
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And can someone tell me what a drive chain is? Heard this a few times today.

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Angelfishsolo replied to Nick T | 10 years ago
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The front and rear cogs and chain.

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Nick T | 10 years ago
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A lot of opinions in here would be very different if the poster had ever had a half decent idea to sell once upon a time and made some money out of it. How dare bike companies make a profit, indeed...

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Beefy replied to Nick T | 10 years ago
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 16

Nick T wrote:

A lot of opinions in here would be very different if the poster had ever had a half decent idea to sell once upon a time and made some money out of it. How dare bike companies make a profit, indeed...

Nothing wrong with a profit but profiteering will encourage other people to sell a comparable item for less. Capitalism works look at the USA health care system

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Beefy replied to Nick T | 10 years ago
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 16

Nick T wrote:

A lot of opinions in here would be very different if the poster had ever had a half decent idea to sell once upon a time and made some money out of it. How dare bike companies make a profit, indeed...

Nothing wrong with a profit but profiteering will encourage other people to sell a comparable item for less. Capitalism works look at the USA health care system

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dave atkinson | 10 years ago
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"lance took drugs so buying a chinarello is fine" is a bit of a leap, no?

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LinusLarrabee replied to dave atkinson | 10 years ago
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Dave Atkinson wrote:

"lance took drugs so buying a chinarello is fine" is a bit of a leap, no?

I agree. But I clearly said I don't condone fakes or ripping off companies, so that wasn't what I was claiming.

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banzicyclist2 | 10 years ago
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I look at all the eye candy and dream / drool over it. I wonder how much better it would make me go?

Then I get on my Ribble I bought throught the cycle to work scheme, true I've invested in better wheels (Kysrium Elite) and saddle (Fizik or however they spell it), and think WOW this bike really suits me, shifts well enough, and decends down the Lake District passes with supreme confidence. Do I need a £4000 super bike..... no not really. If I won the lottery would I buy one anyway..... definately.

Ribbles in the shop for a drive chain upgrade this year. It'll be fantastic, if we get some good weather again.

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Beefy replied to banzicyclist2 | 10 years ago
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I look at all the eye candy and dream / drool over it. I wonder how much better it would make me go?

Then I get on my Ribble I bought throught the cycle to work scheme, true I've invested in better wheels (Kysrium Elite) and saddle (Fizik or however they spell it), and think WOW this bike really suits me, shifts well enough, and decends down the Lake District passes with supreme confidence. Do I need a £4000 super bike..... no not really. If I won the lottery would I buy one anyway..... definately.

Have to agree, got a Ribble Sportive Bianco, upgraded the wheels and g/s to Ultegra. Fantastic bike but begs the question if a small company in preston can supply great carbon bikes at good price why can't the big boys?

If I won lotto could get a colnago c59 disc. Would I ride any better? No but it is nice bit of bling!  105

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Beefy | 10 years ago
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Can you tell me the gross profit trek made internationally last year?

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Beefy | 10 years ago
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Can you tell me the gross profit trek made internationally last year?

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LinusLarrabee | 10 years ago
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I don't condone or support the idea of ripping off any company or purchasing fake products, but the fact that these companies treat their customers like mugs with their inflated prices and this kind of BS scaremongering really diminishes any sympathy I might have for them. It also doesn't help that the press fail to question the assertions made by these industry bodies because they don't want to bite the hands that feed them.

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LinusLarrabee replied to LinusLarrabee | 10 years ago
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… and I don't for one second believe that the fabled "R&D" is quite what people think it is. I've long suspected that what we hear about "research and development" is little more than marketing spin.

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TrekBikesUK replied to LinusLarrabee | 10 years ago
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LinusLarrabee wrote:

I don't condone or support the idea of ripping off any company or purchasing fake products, but the fact that these companies treat their customers like mugs with their inflated prices and this kind of BS scaremongering really diminishes any sympathy I might have for them.

At the risk of sounding derisive (apologies), doesn't that mean you DO condone the idea of purchasing fake products?

You are right that a lot of talk about R&D isn't what people think it is. But, what most people think it is, is marketing hype. While this is true in a lot of cases, it's also not hard to see fact versus fiction.

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