Alibaba’s last initiative goes together with the special team created last year, which has the objective of stopping retailers that sell fake products on its web platforms. Siding with Jack Ma’s group’s HQ, in Xixi (Hangzhou, province of Zhejiang), is now a storage space of 300 squared meters where all confiscated fake products are put, and in which such products will remain for at least three years as proof of the ‘crime’ committed by the retailers that were caught. Alibaba’s ‘anti-fake’ team monitors each year 100,000 products on average, and every 12 months, 1 for every 4 retailers active on the virtual store is analyzed and checked. Qin Seng, head of the team, stated that checks aren’t purely done at random, but rather using ‘big data’, meaning that the group cross-checks information to decide which checks to run. If there is a case of suspected counterfeiting, the products are sent to the appropriate agencies for quality and originality checks; if the product fails the tests, the web pages that offer the product for sale are immediately shut down. Together with various public security offices in 13 Chinese provinces, the ‘anti-fake’ team contributed to the arrest of 880 people, and closed 1,419 businesses that produced fake items in 2016. Even so, counterfeiters often don’t get caught, by changing their names on the web and then enter the e-commerce world once more.
Alibaba wages war on fakes: dedicating an entire team to the problem and providing a 300 squared meters’ site to test the fakes
