Teenage arrests soar as customs cracks down on sale of counterfeit goods

More Hong Kong teenagers are selling fake products through social media for easy pocket money, customs officers warned, with the number of arrests in the first 11 month of this year double that for the whole of 2014.

Officers arrested 54 secondary school pupils and 28 university students for allegedly selling counterfeits items online. This compared to only 41 such cases in 2014, said Louise Ho, head of the intellectual property investigation bureau of the Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department.

The 82 cases account for nearly 40 per cent of all the counterfeit arrests made by customs this year, Ho said. She attributed the sharp increase to the lack of awareness among young people of their legal responsibilities.

Many young people bought counterfeit products from mainland online retail platforms and resold them through social media. They wrongly believed that they would avoid liability as long as they had informed the buyers they were fakes, Ho said.

“They could even be accused of deception if they marked the products as ‘high-quality’ fakes,” she said.

More than half of the arrested students were aged 18 or below.

The youngest was a 13-year-old girl studying in Form Two, who was picked up in March delivering counterfeit soccer shorts. Customs officers seized 62 fake items in her flat and the juvenile court later imposed a care and protection order on her.