Amazon's industry collaboration to track counterfeiters

Amazon have announced the launch of their new Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX) initiative which enables participating retailers to record and track serial counterfeiters in order to create a collaborative database of bad actors online. 

The aim is to make it "more difficult for counterfeiters to move among different stores to attempt to sell their counterfeit goods". 

ACX participants will be able to anonymously contribute information and records on confirmed counterfeiters to a third-party hosted database and to use the information provided by others to aid their own anti-counterfeiting efforts on their respective stores. Amazon claims that the ACX initiative has "already detected hundreds of matching accounts where the same counterfeiter tried to create selling accounts on Amazon and at least one other store operator". 

Reuters reports that Amazon piloted the ACX initiative in 2021 with an undisclosed number of apparel, home goods, and cosmetics stores.

Amazon regularly collaborates with brand owners to take legal action against counterfeiters, so this industry-level collaboration with other retailers seems like a logical next step in their anti-counterfeiting program. Hopefully, Amazon will include the ACX as part of their annual Brand Protection Report so that we can see how the initiative is contributing to online anti-counterfeiting efforts.