Endless market for fakes: 1 million toys seized

An endless market: from designer clothes to medicines, via toys and cosmetics, ending with food, drinks and jewellery. It is the counterfeit industry that has not stopped even during the summer break, just as the activity of the police has not stopped. Only a few days ago, financiers from the Pronto Impiego Group in Naples found numerous toys inside a wholesale dealer without any certificate of conformity with European regulations concerning the 'CE' mark, 'falsely affixed to mislead the user'.

The 'Green Berets' seized 1.5 million unsafe toys, some of which also bore counterfeit registered trademarks, which replicated famous characters from cult animated series followed by generations. Not only that, as the Guardia di Finanza announced in a note, among the products also "10 thousand unsafe cosmetics and jewellery reproducing a mendacious design of well-known jewellery brands". Those in charge of the shop were charged with 'counterfeiting, fraud in trade, selling industrial products bearing false signs and receiving stolen goods, as well as violating the regulations on the safety of cosmetic products'.

In Prato, as part of an operation aimed at combating counterfeiting, 24,000 toys were seized 'lacking the minimum set of information required by the label and therefore completely unsuitable to guarantee their safe use and the genuineness of the materials from which they were made'.

At Malpensa Airport, instead, 9 passengers on an intercontinental flight were reported and 2,040 cartons of smuggled cigarettes worth over 132,000 euro were seized. And still on the subject of counterfeiting, just before mid-August, in Civitavecchia, officials from the Customs Office and financiers from the Provincial Command of Rome intercepted, at the port, a cargo of approximately one thousand adult erotic toys ('sex toys') from China."The products, destined for an Italian company, underwent thorough safety checks and were found to be dangerous to the health of potential consumers," the Customs and Monopolies Agency reported. The Agency's laboratory analyses, carried out on the samples taken, revealed the presence of a quantity of phthalates in excess of the limit imposed by EU regulations, and therefore a potential health hazard.

In Alessandria, 4,000 woollen jumpers were seized 'for false and misleading indications of origin'. "Some labels bore the false indication 'Made in Italy', others reproduced, next to the brand name, the name of Italian localities (Rome, Florence, Viareggio, Bologna-Italy, Genoa, Milan), wording such as 'Designed in Italy', 'Italian experience', 'Italian Style' or, again, the image of flags of Italy, the United States and Japan".