By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

In this economy, even counterfeiters are trading down. After years of knocking off luxury products like $2,800 Louis Vuitton handbags, criminals are discovering there is money to be made in faking the more ordinary - like $295 Kooba bags and $140 Ugg boots. In California, the authorities recently seized a shipment of counterfeit Angel Soft toilet paper. The shift in the counterfeiting industry, which costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year, has been fueled in part by factories sitting idle in China.

Almost 80 percent of the seized counterfeit goods in the United States last year were produced in China, where the downturn in legitimate exports during the recession left many factories looking for goods ? in some cases, any goods - to produce. “If there is demand, there will be supply,” said John Spink, associate director of the Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection Program at Michigan State University.


Criminals are turning to copying ordinary items to keep idle factories in China busy. A fake Louis Vuitton bag.


In China, he said, “It’s all of a sudden them saying, ‘We have low capacity. What can we make?’ ” The answer is increasingly copies of lesser-known brands, which are easy to sell on the Internet, can be priced higher than obvious fakes, and avoid the aggressive programs by the big luxury brands to protect their labels, retail companies and customs enforcement officials say.

The results: Faux Samantha Thavasa bags for $113 and Ed Hardy hoodie sweatshirts for $82.50. And, bizarrely, imitations that are more expensive than the real ones: In 2007, Anya Hindmarch sold canvas totes that said “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” for $15. Now fakes are available on the Web for $99. “If it’s making money over here in the U.S., it’s going to be reverse-engineered or made overseas,” said Jonathan Erece, a trade enforcement coordinator for United States Customs and Border Protection in California.

The traders in mid-price fakes are employing another new trick: by pricing the counterfeits close to retail , they entice unsuspecting buyers. Any savvy shopper, for example, knows a Louis Vuitton bag selling for $100 cannot be the real thing. But when NeimanMarcus.com, an authorized retailer for Kooba bags, sells them for $295, and a small Web site sells them for $190, a consumer could think she has scored a bargain. (She hasn’t. The $190 bag is a fake.) The counterfeiters are also lifting photos and text from legitimate Web sites .

"The consumer is blind as to the source of the product," said Leah Evert-Burks, director of brand protection for Ugg Australia’s parent company, the Deckers Outdoor Corporation. “Counterfeit Web sites go up pretty easily, and counterfeiters will copy our stock photos, the text of our Web site, so it will look and feel like” the company site, she said. The authorities do not publish statistics on what brands’ products are being counterfeited.

But the field is big: the total value of counterfeit goods seized by United States customs officials increased by more than 25 percent each year from 2005 to 2008, using the government’s fiscal calendar. In fiscal 2009, as total imports dropped by 25 percent, the value of counterfeit products seized dropped by only 4 percent to $260.7 million.

The statistics capture only a piece of the problem, companies and experts say, because so many counterfeiters market directly to customers on the Internet. “Online is much harder” to enforce, said Todd Kahn, general counsel for Coach, the handbag and accessories company. That is particularly true for smaller brands. Big companies use legal teams who train customs officials on the nuances of their product, monitor the Web, ask Internet service providers to take down copycat sites and file lawsuits against sellers.

Ugg Australia, the popular boot brand, developed a full enforcement program after it realized how prevalent copies of its boots were. In 2009, 60,000 pairs of boots were confiscated by customs agents globally, Ms. Evert- Burks said. In the same year, the company took down 2,500 Web sites selling fake products, along with 20,000 eBay listings and 150,000 listings on other trading sites like Craigslist and iOffer.

Gucci, Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands have been pursuing similar cases. The lesson for many counterfeiters has been that they have a better chance of avoiding prosecution if they copy smaller brands. Foley & Corinna, a clothing and accessories company in New York, is a popular target with counterfeiters. “Once it’s out there a lot, people won’t even want the real one because then they’re like, ‘People are going to think it’s fake,’ ” said Anna Corinna Sellinger, the company’s co-founder and creative director. “It takes the product away from the designer.”


Almost 80 percent of seized counterfeit goods in America last year were made in China.