Teenage arrests soar as customs cracks down on sale of counterfeit goods
PUBLISHED : Monday, 21 December, 2015, 2:23am
UPDATED : Monday, 21 December, 2015, 2:32am
Christy Leung
[email protected]
Many young people bought counterfeit products from mainland online retail platforms and resold them through social media. Photo: AP
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.
Another girl, aged 18 and in Form Six, was accused of reselling a fake iPhone 6S on the internet in October, at a price of HK$1,700. She pleaded with officers to drop the case, as she planned to study at an overseas university.
Under the Trade Description Ordinance, selling counterfeit goods is liable to a maximum penalty of five years in jail and a fine of HK$500,000 upon conviction.
Since many arrested youngsters are under 18, they would most likely only receive a community service order.
But Ho pointed out that the conviction would leave the offender with a criminal record, which could damage their career prospects. “Even if the sentence is a community service or probation order, will still have a criminal record for life,” she said.
She also warned that dealing in counterfeits is an easily traceable crime. “Trading fake goods in the cyberspace will leave plenty of digital footprints for us to follow.”
She said the student offenders earned hundreds of dollars from selling each item, and that they did so to top up their pocket money in leisure time. Items sold also included sports clothes, smartphone accessories and toys.
So far this year, customs have detected 182 cases of selling fake goods online and arrested 212 people. This compares with 168 cases and 186 arrests in the same period last year.
