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Adam Levantal
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Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more@applecard.com the Athletic FC Podcast Network the following contains themes of terror and strong language from the off A fight over the fabric of football. £115 for a football shirt? That is disgusting. Fakes are on the rise. Our jersey price is very nice. Cages only need 17 pounds. The game has a problem. There's a perfect storm in the football world at the moment, but what's underneath that fake football shirt? It's well documented internationally that counterfeit crime funds terrorism. Why I would say completely avoid stuff like that is because of your personal information being stolen and being hijacked. When we look into counterfeits and we often find that there's also drugs involvement and those represent real, immediate safety dangers. So if you were wearing that product, you were actually poisoning yourself. Buying that fake jersey is far from a victimless crime. I'm Adam Levantal. Well, I've spent the last nine months looking into the illicit trade of counterfeits, uncovering some shocking details along the way. This is a special episode of the Athletic FC podcast, the underground world of fake football shirts. So it's match day here at Stamford Bridge. Blue is the colour that the fans sing about and that's important. Fans of all persuasions have a contract with their team's color. It's tribalism, it's belonging. Those emotions are genuine. But more and more nowadays, the shirt that fans wear to a game isn't the real thing. The online market for knockoff Premier League shirts is now worth £180 million a year. That's equivalent to a third of legitimate sales per season, which hit £489 million. Online searches for fakes, or, as you'll get used to hearing in this investigation, counterfeits, which breach clubs, intellectual property or IP rights, have gone up by over 500% since 2021. I've been speaking to people around the world to understand why it's thriving, who's behind it and how dangerous interacting and funding it can be. Now, most adult Premier League shirts cost between 75 to 85 pounds. Some big clubs, like Chelsea, charge around 125 pounds for player versions. And most clubs switch their kits every season, increasing the burden on the bank balance, especially if you've got to buy for a family as well. Kids shirts here cost £65, so for a family of four, that's £300 all in. All of that is without any customization, names and numbers, and we haven't even started on shorts or socks. The Premier League generates the most money, so that's where I focus the survey on counterfeit football shirt culture, interacting with nearly 300 fans of all 20 clubs, online and in person. Have you ever knowingly bought a fake football shirt? Yes. Yes, I have. Yes. Just one time? Yes. Probably an international one. Maybe 52% of fans we spoke to said that they have knowingly purchased a counterfeit football shirt. Of those, over 80% said they'd continue to do so and cited cost as the main motivating factor. Real ones, again, they're too pricey. I think it's really overpriced, very expensive. To be honest, they border on overpriced. Of those who hadn't bought a counterfeit. The majority simply wanted to be loyal with a genuine purchase. For me, buying a authentic shirt is my way of supporting the club. I choose to buy the real one because it's a memory. Interestingly, of the no voters, there are some floaters. 31% said they would consider buying a fake in the future. Would it ever worry you about where that money might be going? Potentially? I never really thought of it like that. But now that you say that. I'm Rob Warner. I am a consultant creative director in the sportswear industry. There's a perfect storm in the football world at the moment of everybody wants a wants the latest shirts. There's too many of them, they're too expensive. The quality of counterfeits has improved. There's no two ways about it. If I think probably 20 years ago, the first time I saw stuff a counterfeit of something I designed, it was awful. And now it's almost become amongst fans a badge of honour as who can pay the least for the closest counterfeit shirt. It's got its own almost subculture to it now. It's getting increasingly harder to justify the cost of the shirts. On behalf of the industry that I've spent my career in, I think the shirt certainly cost a lot more to make than they're given credit for, probably by people that are interested in counterfeit. There's a lot of other expense that gets caught up in it in terms of the intellectual property, the creation in the first place, the research and development that goes into it. It all adds up. And a football shirt, the value of it is more than just the constituent parts of the materials. It's. But in terms of where the retail price has got to. It's £85 now. It was 65 two years ago. I can't say that even if I was to reduce that back through the various margins of the different stakeholders. But the cost of creating a shirt has increased enough to justify that increase in retail price. I feel something around 55, 60 pounds would be about right. So as Rob mentioned, there's a lot of extra expense that gets wrapped up in a shirt price, like paying for the big promos. Our cannon, our compass guiding us forward is one current and former players feature. The devil isn't something you wear. Even rock legends like Ozzy Osbourne too. Jaren, have you seen my trades? The brands pay millions and need to recoup their money. Clubs have to look after their bottom line as well. Here's the Athletics senior football news reporter Matt Slater. To break it down so let's start with how much it costs to make the shirt. That's approximately £10. It's £3 for marketing, another £2 for shipping, logistics and distribution. Plus the manufacturer's markup is around £25. So it's £40 and we're not even at the retailer. It also takes roughly £25. There's £5 for licensing. And finally in the UK, there's 20% VAT, a sales tax, which brings us up to £85, the average cost of a genuine Premier League football shirt. But those who don't want to engage in official shirts take the fake option, sometimes called reps or dupes. But that doesn't mean delving into the dark corners of the web. They are everywhere. Listen, bro, let me just show you how good the quality of these jerseys are. Click the link in my bio. All these beautiful kits over there will not regret it. Shipping takes a month. Is this the best website for fake football shirts out there? From kitgg7.com now, this was previously be our fans. Kick GG, Kick G 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Remember this guy from earlier? 115 pounds for a football shirt. Well, I tracked him down. My name's George, also known as peasy on TikTok. My main focus is talking about the football and of course my team, mainly Chelsea. Tell me about the counterfeit market in your eyes. Because it is, from my experience and my research, it is a very strong community where people talk about it openly, interact with each other, swap stories, swap reviews. It's very much in the open, isn't it? 100%. It used to be a very hidden. Nobody really said, oh, I've ordered this from there. You didn't want to openly admit that, but I feel now because of the pricing, people just aren't bothered anymore. If you've gone out and ordered your football kit and you've paid 12 pound for it, own it. A lot of people do it. I know a lot of myself and a lot of my friends do it. It used to be like, oh, God, you buy things off these Chinese websites now it's just really common because of the price disparity that the big companies are forcing on these football shirts. The price of football shirts nowadays is just, it's got to a point now where it's extortionate. They're not affordable, in my opinion, for the general public. Who could go, right, I'm going to spend 80 to 120 pounds on this kit or I'm going to go and spend 12 to 15 pounds on this kit. I just think there's such a disparity. I would probably prefer to buy real football kits because I want to support my club and support money back into the team that I love, but I just can't justify 10 times the price that I could buy it for and have exactly the same item of pretty much the same quality. So PZ doesn't sell the shirts, he buys them from Chinese sites. US government ranks China as the most notorious counterfeit market, providing 90% of all goods seized at US borders. It has a huge impact on the world's economy. Analysts cor search say 5% of global trade will be counterfeit to by 2030, with the industry worth 1.5 trillion pounds. The IP office says the UK economy loses 9 billion pounds a year because of counterfeiting and piracy, costing 80,000 jobs in the country. It's over 5 million worldwide. So I wanted to find out what happens on the ground in and I spoke to two people who work in anti counterfeiting in the region. Due to the nature of their work, they didn't want to be identified. They said most fake shirts are made in Malua town in Guanxi province, a hub for many years. But no one can solve the issue because of what the source says is local protection. The factories want to make money fast. Where that money goes is a gray area. I was told some of the biggest Chinese online shopping platforms sell fake shirts. Aliexpress has been flagged by US authorities as a notorious seller in the past, so it's surprising to see it as an official partner of UEFA for Euro 2024, when the teams participating in the tournament may have suffered losses because of unofficial sales on the platform. UEFA didn't comment on the suitability of the partnership. Meanwhile, Aliexpress said it is committed to protecting IP rights and prohibits merchants from listing items that infringe upon the IP rights of third parties. We have measures in place to combat counterfeit listings. Dhgate, which also has a cult following among fake shirt enthusiasts, didn't respond to the athletic when asked questions about their practices. So reps might finally be dead. There's some huge news regarding one of the biggest replica sneaker and fashion distributors, AKA Panda Buy, and it broke over the weekend in April last year, Chinese authorities, working in collaboration with other entities, raided Panda Buy's head office in Huangzhou and seized millions of dollars worth of counterfeit stock, enough to fill 20 football stadiums, said law enforcement officers. But as you'll find out over the course of this investigation, that was just a Dent in an industry that appears bulletproof especially thanks to the power of social media. I come from China, what about you? So if you guys interested in any jersey just feel free and don't be shy. Type in the comments, let me know. So I've gone online on TikTok and searched for football shirts and one account has come up live whereby there's a woman standing in front of a whole rack of football shirts behind her and then she is talking about all the shirts that they have and interacting with some of the followers online. Let's just have a listen. Arsenal, right? Okay, we do have the Arsenal sample and which player is your fairy? So I'm going to ask the question what shirts do you have? What shirts do you have? We have all kinds of jersey which changes part. Aidan, I'm going to put in Liverpool. You support Liverpool. This is the Liverpool special edition. Okay, so she's now holding up Liverpool. Which player is your favorite in Liverpool? Liverpool special edition. Okay so she just asked me what is my favorite player. Let's put in Mar okay, we can print the in Salah name on any jersey bag. 5 pounds for the costume name. Our jersey price is very nice. Okay, just only need 17 pounds my friend. 17 pounds. We will say goodbye to you if you guys haven't followed. Don't forget to follow and send a message to my account. So that exchange ended quite abruptly. It appeared that the woman became a little bit suspicious of me. But she did say to message about my order and that account, like many Others promoted Chinese WhatsApp numbers to contact them. So I got in touch. The multiple conversations quickly moved on from buying an individual shirt for £17 to buying wholesale as if I was a retailer myself for online in store or market. Well, one account said that they could get the cost price down to just six pounds for a large order of 500 to 1,000 shirts with further reductions available over time if I was loyal, if I sold online on my own website they said they would also send orders direct to customers, a process known as dropshipping. But what if I wanted the stock sent to me? One advised against using shipping containers? We'll have more on that later on. They said they would use multiple boxes via regular postal services and that would be fine. On that topic, this is what one of the sources told There is basically no problem with customs because taxes and fees are paid in advance. You can rest assured about this. I have been shipping to Europe for a long time and I have experienced all kinds of customs, especially the British customs which is easier to Deal with. We'll come Back to this WhatsApp exchange shortly. It sounds like becoming an online seller of fake shirts is straightforward and it reminded me of the first police raid I went on when this investigation started last summer, when the Euros was in full swing. Yeah. So we're going to an address in North London to execute search warrant for someone selling cap for football shirts, Nike football shirts. So they're an online seller selling various things and basically there's an undercover purchase that's been made some time ago. We're going to their address. We told that there's more shirts there and obviously for them to be arrested and to be interviewed in connection with that. That's Detective Sergeant Matt Hussey. Hi. Can you open the door? Can you open the door, please? Or it's going to go in, so come and open it now. Thank you. So we've now moved from where the arrest was made at the residential address to a storage unit where there is a suspicion that there is more counterfeit shirts stored. Go and have a look. If we just go down the line and look at the shirts that have been uncovered here, we have Russia, Dortmund, Arsenal, Manchester United, Juventus. We have Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Chelsea shirt in there, Tottenham as well and Barcelona. Virtually all the big clubs in Europe covered just in this storage area. Yeah, it's been a really successful operation today. So we've executed a search warrant, suspect's home address. We've recovered counterfeit shirts there. We've also recovered counterfeit shirts in the back of that person's car, which were already packaged to go out to customers for delivery throughout the uk. And we've then executed a further search warrant at a storage location and recovered more counterfeit football shirts as well, including English shirts for the current Euros. A lot of online sellers set up their own profiles and that and sell counterfeit shirts throughout the uk. It's a huge industry, I mean, making sort of billions, millions of pounds out of this. And what people don't see when they're buying these types of shirts, appreciate that they're cheap, but it's the conditions that they're made in the modern day slavery of the people that make these shirts and forced into doing that. And also the other activity around what the money that's made out of this goes to, to basically create, assist other criminality throughout this country and around the world. So you heard modern slavery mentioned there. Let's get back to that WhatsApp exchange to the contact in China. I asked him about production. We can produce 20 to 50,000 shirts a day. The real ones are produced by my friend's factory. The original materials are basically the same. Because China's labor costs are relatively low, the price of goods is low. Well, he said one worker would oversee the production of 1,000 shirts per day. So how much would they be paid? About 150 to 300 Chinese yuan a day. That's just 15 to 30 pounds per day. Fake football shirts are so much cheaper because someone in the production line is often being exploited. My name is Ulrike Bonnier. I'm director of programs at the Transnational alliance to Combat Illicit Trade and I lead our work on forced labor, child labor and human trafficking. In illicit supply chains. They treat their workers as disposable components of the manufacturing and sale of illicit products with little or no regard to their safety and well being. So that counterfeit football shirt, that's going to support a criminal organization that, contrary to legitimate businesses, don't have any reputations to protect and can mistreat workers as much as they want, and they do. In counterfeit manufacturing, there are honestly so many awful cases of exploitation that it's hard to just highlight a few. But there was one in Thailand, for example, where little children were assembling counterfeit leather handbags and the owner had broken the children's legs because they said that they wanted to go outside and play. Another one that comes to mind is in Brazil, where workers in a counterfeit clothing factory were forced to work over 15 hours per day at below minimum wage in an unhealthy and dangerous environment. And they also had their wages withheld. And one employee was almost beaten to death because he was raising the fact that he hadn't been paid for three months. So these are just a few examples, but it's also important to remember that this happens everywhere. In Italy, seven workers died when a fire broke out in a counterfeit factory they were working in. And the investigations that followed after that fire showed that they had been working 14 to 16 hours per day, no days off. They had slept in the factory itself. And that factory, of course, didn't have any fire protection or any alarm systems at all in place. And when people consider purchasing counterfeit items such as football shirts, what would you say to them, considering the research that you've carried out? I. I think you need to think about what type of business and perhaps more importantly, the type of business practices that you want to support and create a demand for. So given the illegal nature of counterfeiting, everything that happens there is outside of the normal controls and oversight that a labor force would normally have. And that makes those workers very vulnerable to abuse. Buying that fake jersey is far from a victimless crime. You have everything from, you know, migrants that have been smuggled into a country that are coerced into selling these counterfeit goods. You have children that are being used and abused in the production of counterfeit items. So in these counterfeiters, pursuits of profits, they're cutting corners and they're cutting costs at the expense of men, women and children that are working in these illegal businesses. Coming up on the underground world of fake football shirts, more links to organized crime. So we're on the corner here at Barry New Road and Sherborne Street. This is what was known as counterfeit street and terrorism. It's no far cry at all that that that money could be going to buy items used for a terrorist attack. Ever feel like everything's getting more expensive? Groceries, rent, even breathing. And let's not forget car insurance. It just keeps creeping up. But here's the thing. Insurify makes one part of life easier. It's an insurance comparison site that finds real time quotes from dozens of top insurers. Insurance companies compete for your business, driving down prices. It's like having a friend who knows all the best deals, but without the smug grin. 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Visit a store or go online today only at Metro by T Mobile. When you join Metro plus Tax for a limited time, it's subject to change. Max one offer per account this is a special edition of the Athletic FC podcast, the underground world of fake football shirts. Before we head to Manchester, a quick crash course in spotting a fake shirt. My name is Ben Houston. I work for BAC4 and I work in ground protection anti counterfeiting. As a consultant, the three things you need to consider, obviously price. If it's too good to be true, it is. So anything that is 30 pounds or below is going to be counterfeit. Then you think about place, where am I buying this from? If you're buying it from JD Sports or Sports Direct or Nike, obviously you don't need to be concerned about that. But if you're buying it from somewhere else, like a market, for example, you just need to question whether this is the type of place that will be selling an official football shirt. And then in terms of the product, on a swing tag, there should usually be a barcode sticker. With the majority of the fakes, it won't actually be a sticker, it will just be something that's printed into the card so it's superimposed. And that's because those details will just be duplicated under a number of shirts. And then one of the other little key things I look for is if you look on the care layer which is inside the product, if there's any sort of pen or scribble on, that's normally an indicator that the product is fake as well. Usually the quality won't be as great as the authentic thing. So normally the stitching will be a poor finish. In some instances, just the colour using the fabric will be totally off to what the official shirt should be like. And then I guess further down the line, when you start to wash these things, they tend to not hold the shape. You'll tend to find that the sponsors will come off in the wash. Unfortunately, by that point, it's probably too late. More from Ben Houston later. Okay, so I'm now here in Manchester at the home of the Rainbow Premier League champions, City. Four in a row, it proudly says, on the outside of the Etihad Stadium, which is right in front of me. The club shop is just to the left, which churns out official merchandise made by Puma. The brand told us they do all they can to combat the issue of counterfeits with global law enforcement. But they say it's alarming that more and more consumers are willing to purchase fakes, especially when it helps infringers, often backed by organized crime, strengthen their market share. It wasn't that long ago that City celebrated being the best In Europe, and not far from here is a place that held the unfortunate moniker of being the counterfeit capital of Europe, Cheetham Hill, where I'm off to meet Chief Inspector Andrew Torkington of Greater Manchester Police, who's going to take me on a tour of the area. So we're on the corner here at Berry New Road and Sherborne Street. This is what was known as counterfeit Street. This road is a main arterial road into the city centre. It would be double parked, there would be hundreds and thousands of people on the street corners. There would be spotters, one to identify the police were there and two, to try and get your respective purchases of cart foot product to come into the premises. The premises behind us is one that we had. We did some, quite a lot of work here, a number of counterfeit shops. We had a huge counterfeit football kit seizure within this premises and we closed down over 216 of these shops. So the area was rife. We counterfeit. And premises like this one in front of us would make, you know, conservatively between 30 and 40,000 pounds a week cash. That money would go to a transfer premises and that money would be sent back to the country of origin where the occupier was working to be used for, you know, unknown means. Really the profits in counterfeiting are extremely high. So as much as you might think, oh, we're getting a cheap bargain here, that money's going back into serious and violent crime in the area, going back into the drug trade and the money from the count. It was also sort of bolstering that we had 33 organized crime groups that were mapped and linked to this area, that were controlling every. Everything. You really did take your chance if you were a female or a child. There was a lot of sexual assaults. There was a lot of assaults going on. If the cops came past, the doors would be shot, knife to the throat, keep quiet, don't say a word. What are the most troubling things that you've seen that are outside of the actual sale of, of counterfeit products? One of the very first jobs we had was a criminal gang in a van pulls up, jumps out machetes and it's a knife attack. And, and watching those CCTV was horri. Horrific. It was quite literally something out of a film, the chopping. A teacher there, there's one lad goes down, fortunately moves out the way as this machete rains down on him and then the cops turn up. So these lads get arrested and it turns out that they are committing an aggravated burglary on a rival store. I think it's well documented internationally that counterfeit crime funds terrorism, be it in part or whole. An expert on the link between counterfeiting and terrorism is Mubin Sheikh, a former radicalized Taliban supporter turned counter terrorism expert who's infiltrated active groups and worked with law enforcement. It's been going on for the past 30 plus years and because our attention has been on the loud, we've totally taken the eye off of the counterfeiting, the benign stuff or the seemingly benign stuff. I've grown up in the environment, I've grown up in the communities. I've seen it up front, up close, I've walked the walk and I've pulled people back from the brink and I continue to do that today. We had many cases of ISIS types, Al Qaeda supporters in the early 2000s who were groups that I was infiltrating. You know, they talked about this, they talked about all sorts of counterfeiting. Not only did they collect money in the mosque, but they also sold drugs, robbed banks, sold fraudulent documentation, counterfeit goods. Like they really diversified their portfolios there. There's not as much attention on them anymore. And then we take the eye off the ball and then suddenly, oh no, how could this happen when you were being radicalized or radicalized? Was counterfeiting part of the toolkit? Certainly the concept of counterfeiting goods was part of the conversation, the larger conversation on how to make money to fund operations, to do whatever was needed to do. And keep in mind these so called jihadists, one of the reasons why they are so completely out of Islam is because they promote this idea of ends justifies means, which is a foreign concept in Islam. One cannot achieve or attain a halal goal, a lawful goal, using unlawful means. Fraud, as we all know, is a form of theft. So these for these folks who use that ends justifies the means because they'll use this, remember, to justify attacking civilians, attacking religious people, attacking their own people and of course counterfeit goods because they're all kuffar companies and the more we can rob from them, the better. That's the mentality. So why is counterfeiting so attractive to terrorist or organised crime groups? Because they see it as high profit and relatively low risk when it comes to punishments compared to the more serious crimes they're committing. To uncover that, law enforcement and their partners need to follow the money. My name is Elke Bichele, I'm the CEO of Risiko Tech. It's a company that does financial crime investigations with these follow the money investigations, we look closer into all the clues that people leave behind. So it could be online data footprints. And so we follow those data footprints and we have various databases where we can get information from. And then we put the puzzle together and we identify where likely is the money. So economic crime can be very common, complex and very sophisticated. And there's no end to tricks that people can use. Once you've got the proceeds of the crimes, you have to layer it somehow that it doesn't appear like it's from illicit sources. You have to enter it into the financial system somehow, be it cash, albeit online funds, and then you need to spread it out so nobody gets suspicious. Counterfeiting is a huge business. We've done a lot of research on the size of the business. People want to wear logos and people want to be part of something. They want to be looking cool. And so we see many criminals enter this field of counterfeiting and many customers supporting it. Bikele has also seen firsthand the risks that people take with their own data and financial security when they simply press buy online. So there's lots of scamming that can go with it. So we hear of one scam where they say, oh, yeah, you, you need to do the payment, but you need to download my payment app. And then of course they have all the details because it's their app in their server and their everything. So they have the passwords and access to the bank accounts and so on. And then the next sort of crime is that they clean out the whole bank account. Happened in Singapore. Somebody wanted to buy something small like a T shirt. And then the criminals had the bank account details and immediately they cleaned out all their savings. They took loans because taking loans online is easy. And they maxed out credit cards and so on within a day, not had. They only lost all their savings, they also had new loans to pay back. So it's serious, very serious, if you engage with these kind of people. Next on the underground world of fake football shirts, we witness the shredding of 25, 000 counterfeits. Well, the destruction process has now begun. And if you buy one on holiday, are they made here or in China? They're made in Morocco or at home. I've never seen anything like it in in the uk. Have you saw about the health risks? Those represent real immediate safety dangers. So if you were wearing that product, you were actually poisoning yourself. Daredevil is born again on Disney plus. My name is Matthew Murdoch. I'm a lawyer. Exactly what kind of a lawyer are you a really good one. Critics everywhere agree it's the best Marvel television series. Gritty, intense, and elevated, it's Daredevil at his best. If you step out of line, I will be there. Marvel Television's Daredevil, born again. Now streaming only on Disney. I'm ready for my life to change. ABC tonight, American Idol returns. Give it your all. Good luck. Come out with the golden ticket. Let's hear it. This is a man's world. I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. You're going to Hollywood. Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryant and Ryan Seacrest on American idol. Season premiered tonight, 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. This is a special edition of the Athletic FC podcast, the underground world of fake football shirts. Now, remember, I mentioned shipping containers earlier on. Well, soon we'll go to Malta to explain. All but many people who answered our survey mentioned buying fake shirts at markets abroad and at home. Okay, so we've just arrived at a place called Wellsbourne Market in Warwickshire where there's been quite a few issues with the sale of counterfeit products, and that includes the sale of counterfeit football shirts. So we're just going to go and have a look to see if the intelligence that has been gathered still manifests itself as people selling them openly to the public here on the market. Let's go and have a look. Well, it didn't take long to find it. It was one of the busiest stalls selling a huge array of fake football kits for heavily discounted prices. So I've just got back into the car and it is remarkable. Wellsbourne Market. I've never seen anything like it in in the UK based on an airfield. You walk around and it is virtually all counterfeit products of brands like Nike, Adidas, Puma. There's perfumes, there's watches, there's handbags. There's a lot of attention on the flagrant way that the fake football shirts are being sold online. But this is on the ground. This is very much in the open. But the problem is in a situation like this, when you have such a huge market, how would you combat something like this? And then because you're dealing with counterfeit offenses, IP offenses, there's no way of necessarily tracking exactly where everyone is from because they're on a remote location. And, yeah, it is. It is so difficult to combat this. I contacted the Platt Group, who run Wellesbourne Market. They say they carry out inspections at the start of each trading day, admitted they are aware of some unlicensed products and now intend to take action on the sale of fake football shirts. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for waiting. We would now like to continue boarding for all economy class customers. Well, this is the, the old market in Rabat in Morocco. Many of you will have been to similar sort of souk style markets, especially if you go to North Africa or Turkey perhaps. And I've come to see if they sell football shirts and I can already see some ahead of me and we're just going to go and see what they're like and where they're being made as well. You have all the kits, which ones do you have? Messi. You have Messi. Is that Inter Miami one? You've got all of them, Lots of them. This is a. Not real. This is a imitation. Yeah, not real. Real. Not real, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Are they made here or in China or. No, Morocco. They're made in Morocco. Okay. Well, as you heard there, the shirts that that guy was selling in his stall were, were being made not in China, but they were being made here in Morocco. And a local told me a story regarding the, the football shirts and the, the quickness of the, the retail market here in Morocco, that they were making messy shirts from Inter Miami before he'd officially signed and they had them at available and people were buying them. But also when Real Madrid played in Morocco in the Club World cup against Al Ali of Egypt and there was a huge rush on Real Madrid shirts and many were sold from markets like this and the whole stadium virtually was dominated by Real Madrid shirts. And a lot of the Real Madrid fans who, who'd traveled from Spain for the Club World cup game were disappointed that that money wasn't going into the coffers of Real Madrid and they were frustrated and many of the Al Ahi fans were disappointed that a fellow Arab country wasn't being supported in Al Ahli and everyone was wearing Real Madrid shirts. So it just shows how responsive the market can be here in Morocco, that they can act quickly, they can make the shirts very quickly and get them out onto the market, be that online or markets like the one that I'm in now. Well, I'm here on the beach in Malta and many of you will know it as a popular European holiday destination. But it also plays a key role in the combat against the movement of counterfeit products around the world. Why? Because of its strategic position in the Mediterranean and the fact that it has a deep sea port, meaning that huge ships carrying around 10, 20 or 30,000 containers can dock here on their journey from the east, from Asia from the west, west from South America. And then once some of that cargo is offloaded, that can then be moved to the north or the south. It means counterfeit products will come through this tiny island. And it means that the customs officials here are trying to intercept as many of the counterfeit products as possible. So containers just come in and it's going to be scanned as we speak because customs have decided that they wanted to have a closer look. So let's have a look ourselves. So the contents of that container is now being scanned, right? It's being analyzed by the officers, yes, to check if there are any anomalies noted. That's Randolph Mizzi, one of Malta customs senior inspectors. So these are some of the shirts that you have intercepted. Take me through them. We have Barcelona, Juventus, PSG from Liga Man United and Spurs, AC Milan and even national votings. So it was a big hole of kits from China. Can you tell me how you came about pulling those containers and coming to that decision or not? Well, I can't give away a lot, but obviously after we scan the container and renowned some anomalies, we do the physical inspection in this case and in many other cases, when we opened the container and physically checked it, we found these illegal items. You can understand why the customs officials here in Malta don't want to give precise details about how they come to their decisions. But it is clear that they are looking for any anomalies in the whole process. So perhaps a sender that has given very little details or the routing of that particular container raises some suspicions. There is also an element of using previous intelligence. So anyone that has previously sent anything that has been suspicious, they have on a list and they keep a very watchful eye if they pop up again in the future. So what happens next? Once you've seized the goods, what do you do? What happens? All right, after we seize the goods, there's a procedure which will lead us to the destruction of the fake goods. We're now inside the storage unit that is used by Malta customs, and this is where all of their seized counterfeit products are kept. There's some familiar brand brands here. Samsung batteries, PlayStation. There's some clothing over here as well. And then at the back of this storage area, there are huge piles of boxes. On one side is a big haul of Adidas kits, including Arsenal kits from China, which are still subject to a court case, which, which is ongoing. So they are being kept here for now to be used as evidence. And then on the other side, there are a huge stack of foxes so they're all Premier League kits that were seized, another 25,000. So in this storage unit, approximately 50,000 football kits and they're all counterfeit products. So we've now moved location from the storage unit to the waste recycling center where all the kits are going to be destroyed. So that noise is the kits being offloaded from the truck that brought them from the storage unit and they're just now being stacked into a big pile. It's all very uncompromising because these kits are going to be destroyed very, very shortly. There's a picker alongside me. There is someone ready to operate it and then they're going to be picked up very unceremoniously dropped into the shredder and ripped into thousands of tiny pieces. I just want to paint the picture in front of me and it is quite a sight. There are all now the boxes that were in the storage unit all piled high in front of me. I can see some Tottenham kits that have spilt out of one of the boxes. One of the others has three letters PSG written on it. There's some Manchester City shirts strewn on the floor. The picker is just lowering the itself down now. And then you look down below where the initial big shredder has ground down the shirts and there is a riot of color. To be honest, you still see the remnants of some badges and some sponsors and some distinctive elements of the football kits. And then they work their way up the conveyor belt and it's ground down into even finer pieces. They've been destroyed and that limits the funding to the counterfeiters for whatever they wanted to be putting their money towards. It's not an easy job. It's not an easy job and it's not, not easy to stop everything. But we'll do our utmost. Is there any part of you that thinks, hang on a minute, we should maybe give these to charity or something like that? Yeah, I've been asked this question before. No, not at all, not at all. Because mainly we don't know what material they're using. When you buy the original stuff, the material might be quality controlled to avoid anything like rashes on the skin, any infections on the skin. It might be also fireproof as well. If we don't display these and get them out in the market, will be supporting terrorism like child labor, weapons for mass destruction, human trafficking, drugs and anything that goes. So no for me, I enjoy seeing them. So Randolph mentioned the health risks there. It could impact you or your family. We need to find out more. I'm Steve Lamar, I'm the president and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear association here in Washington D.C. in the United States, authentic products go through a lot of testing and compliance and evaluation. None of that stuff happens in the making of an inauthentic product to duplicate. We commissioned a study a couple of years ago where we collected a number of counterfeit products that our members had purchased that we purchased that were definitely counterfeits. We tested them and found unacceptably and poisonous levels of heavy metals, things like arsenic, cadmium, lead, phthalates. And those represent real immediate safety dangers. So if you were wearing that product, you were actually poisoning yourself. Steve Lamar, as you can hear, is strong on the health risks of fakes. We also spoke about politics. Donald Trump wasn't the US President when we started this investigation. He is now and he's big on significant tariffs on foreign imports. All this tariff talk on this side of the pond is creating a lot of discussion about what consumers are going to do to avoid the inevitable price increases that massive supply chain costs like tariffs create. And that brings us back to that conversation about counterfeiters. Some of the biggest winners in a trade war are counterfeiters because their pricing is arbitrary due to their nearly non existent cost structure. They can show up looking like heroes by underpricing authentic, safe and responsibly sourced but now more expensive fashion and of course sports products like soccer jerseys. It's so sad that these new tariffs will actually be helping the bad guys. Still to come on the underground world of fake football shirts. We ask premier league clubs if they back a price cap, tell you how Cheetham Hill was cleaned up. We send Christmas cards out saying if you want to engage in criminality, we look forward to seeing you in the new year. But how the counterfeiters always seem to resurface. I went down to the basement and there was two men in there. Lots of boxes. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do get a $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be, to be. Push it real good at gnc, nutrition's not a department, it's a Whole freaking store get better fuel for bigger gains to sculpt that revenge body and have you feeling like you're ready to push. GNC spent 90 years perfecting nutrition and protein that literally tastes like cake. So you can look like cake. You got goals, you got results. It's GNC, baby. Visit yourGNC or gnc.com this is the Underground world of fake football shirts from the Athletic fc. Earlier, we heard about the issues that existed in the Cheetham Hill area of Manchester before Operation Vulcan arrived. Operation Vulcan has been a big success in, in the battle against counterfeiting. And the quantities of what we actually see were huge, certainly in the UK and Europe as well. We cut the shutters off and we'd go in there at 5 o'clock in the morning. So tell me about the biggest seizure of of Operation Vulcan had intelligence that there was a storage yard. There was 207 containers on that storage yard, all full of counterfeit property or believed to be full of counterfeit property. We had over 580 tons of counterfeit clothing that was a street value of £87 million. So your loss to industry there, if that had been sold in your legitimate sports shops to your legitimate customers, was sort of in the region of 870 million. So we're not far off. You know, a billion pounds worth lost to industry there we're trying to do was to make this area safe, to seize this product. Basically we were hitting them where it hurts because they were losing millions of pounds worth of stock. What we found after three months maybe is that they didn't fill the vacuum, is that it very quickly cottoned onto the fact that we weren't going away. And that's what we publicized. That's what went on social media. You're next. We send Christmas cards out saying, if you want to engage in criminality, we look forward to seeing you in the new year. Now that's quite a bold thing for the police to do, I would suggest, but it worked in that area with what we were trying to tackle. It was a big success. Partnership working at its finest. But counterfeiting, as we know, is an underground world. So for law enforcement, and it's like whack a mole. As soon as you shut one down, another pops up. Now, since the action in Cheetham Hill, there's been a significant surge of fake football shirt sales here in Camden Town in North London. And there's been a series of raids to try and combat the problem. 3500 fake shirts were seized from two premises recently. Worth in the region of 1.5 million pounds. The problem is the counterfeiters move really quickly to restock. So I'm here to see if one of the shops that was raided has done just that. We are not selling. They close. The shop is different. That's not my shop. I work here. But have you got the ones? Yeah, they say they are close. Have you got the arsenal of the black Arsenal shirt? What's this? My size watch. You are without. The name is Johnny Clyde. So there you go. Yes, they were selling fake shirts once again. There was some initial pushback from the shop owner who didn't want me going down to the bank basement level. But when I eventually got down there, the room was full of shirts. Premier League, European retro, you name it, they had it hung on walls and boxes full of them were stacked up because they were restocking and ready to sell again, even though they'd been raided recently. And all of this is happening in the constituency of the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who is the MP for Holborn and St Pancras. Now, the Camden Castle Council say that they're committed to working with police and partners to protect the public from poor quality or unsafe goods being sold. But clearly there's a lot of work still to be done if they're going to win the battle here, just like they did in Cheetham Hill. It's a thankless task online as well. Counterfeiters often use business addresses to add a veneer of authenticity to their websites. One company with the word Jersey in their title that I looked into used a Central London property as their address. I contacted the location and they'd never heard of the company, but admitted it happens a lot. That site was soon shut down, but just like in Camden, they were soon back selling online. They switched their web address to.net rather than.com and used a business address in the north of England instead. Influencers are a big part of the fake shirt industry too. One on TikTok told me he received up to 8% commission if people click on his links. One teenage influencer who promotes fake Chinese products earns thousands of pounds per month. The agency who represent him, yes, he does have an agent refused to comment on the fact that he was promoting fake sales via his socials. It's awkward because the agency also worked with sports brands and international footballers. More fakes mean you might end up unwittingly buying one on an auction site or in person somewhere. Ben Houston, who we heard from earlier on, has developed an app called Kit Legit to help. So Kit Legit utilizes AI and machine learning to identify fakes. How it does this is we built a database which has thousands of shirts and we've identified the red flags associated with fakes and then through providing five to seven images, the tech is comparing those red flag indicators against the images of the shirt to then give you a result whether something's authentic or counterfeit. Well, one English club already used the app to try and catch people who return fakes to their official store wanting a refund. But what else can clubs do to reduce the market for fakes? Brentford told us they don't have a huge issue with counterfeits. Why? Well, they've kept their kits for more than one season to offer greater affordability and focus on sustainability. Ipswich and Wolves charged the lowest prices in the Premier league, just under £60 compared to the average £85. Wolves kit supplier Sudo want fix a broken model where fans are mainly given a choice between paying excessive prices for official products, buying counterfeit or not buying at all. They say they've cut out middlemen to keep prices lower. Adidas, who supply seven Premier League teams the most of all say counterfeiters tarnish the reputation of our brand on pricing, though they say reflective of the level of sustainability and performance innovation and they're designed and produced to be worn proudly by fans for years to come. Only Adidas, Puma and Sudu of seven Premier League brands responded to the Athletic when we asked them to engage the Premier League said we take the issue extremely seriously to protect supporters. Their anti counterfeiting program helped seize 400,000 fakes worth 28 million pounds last season and removed 180,000 online listings worth 4 million pounds. To reduce the gamma gap between cheap fakes and high priced genuine shirts, we asked all 20 Premier League clubs if they'd support a price cap. The response was really disappointing. Only Ipswich and Brentford responded saying they were happy with the measures they were taking. Four offered no comment. Liverpool, Tottenham, West Ham and Leicester. Fourteen didn't reply at all, including the rest of the big seven. The two Manchester clubs, Arsenal, Chelsea and Newcastle. Remember, if clubs wanted to vote on a reduction to make it fairer for fans, Two thirds or 14 clubs would need to agree just like they did to cap away ticket prices to 30 pounds. But the lack of a response I got on the issue of fakes smacks more of them burying their heads in the sand and wanting to keep prices high to help themselves. It certainly doesn't help fans, only the counterfeiters and everything that lies beneath. I would ask you just to think about where that product's come from, why it's so cheap online and what is that going to support in the uk? You're buying worker rights violations, you're buying product safety violations, you're buying pollution to the environment, child labor, forced labor, human trafficking, long hours, dangerous working conditions, passports being confiscated and then payments of either unlawfully low wages or no payment of wages at all. Think of the environment. Think of the humans at the other end of it with most things, not just with clothing. If you're not paying the price for something, somebody else is. So then, bearing all of this in mind, do you still feel good wearing this logo on your counterfeit shirt? This special episode of the Athletic FC podcast, the Underground world of Fake Football Shirts was written and presented by myself, Adam Levantal. Mixing was carried out by J. Beal. The executive producer was Abby Patterson.