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9 August 2018Trademarks

Five charged with trafficking counterfeit Nike Air Jordans

Five New York City residents have been arrested and charged for trafficking hundreds of thousands of Nike Air Jordan shoes into the US.

On Tuesday, August 7, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit announced that Miyuki Suen, Jian Min Huang, Songhua Qu, Kin Lui Chen, and Fangrang Qu had imported the shoes from China into the US.

Once the shoes arrived in the US, the defendants branded them with counterfeit Nike trademarks.

According to the HSI, the five individuals imported at least 42 shipments containing an estimated 380,000 pairs of shoes between January 2016 and July 2018. Once the shoes were affixed with counterfeit Nike trademarks, they were allegedly stored in multiple units and warehouses, including in New York City and elsewhere.

Federal law enforcement officers uncovered the activity when they carried out searches of one of the warehouses and storage units as well as the residence of someone related to the scheme. The officers’ searches found thousands of counterfeit shoes, counterfeit trademarks, and machinery to apply the trademarks to the shoes.

The five individuals are each charged with one count of conspiring to traffic counterfeit goods into the US and one count of trafficking counterfeit goods into the US.

Each of the defendants could face up to 20 years in prison.

“These five individuals are alleged to have been a part of a large-scale counterfeiting scheme, importing nearly a half million pairs of knock-off Nike sneakers,” said Angel Melendez, special agent in charge of HSI New York.

Geoffrey Berman, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, added that the charges “send a clear message to would-be counterfeiters: ‘Just don’t do it’”.

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