Trademark pirates won’t even stop at faking a website in order to distribute counterfeit products via the internet. WIKA has now also been affected by such criminality – under the domain www.wika-wika.cn, a company from Shanghai faked the homepage of WIKA China.
Faking the website was publicly denounced with Plagiarius disgraceful award
The company’s Trademarks & Patents department, however, did not hesitate and made sure that this online trap disappeared. In addition, the internationally recognised Aktion Plagiarius awarded the case one of its “name and shame” awards and thus shone a spotlight on the company responsible.
Counterfeiting a product is bold. “But stealing the entire identity of a well-known manufacturer, including photos, texts and history, is unscrupulous!”, WIKA’s trademark protection team concluded. Faking the website of WIKA China involves a number of serious offences – infringement of trademark and copyright law, deliberate deception of website users and damage to WIKA’s good reputation, which is based on the high quality of WIKA products. That is why the Trademarks & Patents department uses all legal means to take resolute action against trademark piracy of any kind.
The original on the left, the fake on the right: untrained viewers can easily fall for a fake website.
More and more counterfeits are sold online
The appearance of www.wika-wika.cn with the perfidious note ’Copyright: WIKA China Website’ underlines a development that poses new challenges for trademark protection. According to WIKA’s counterfeiting experts, more counterfeit products are now circulating via e-commerce than “over the counter”.
WIKA has taken immediate steps to react to this change. For years now, the Trademarks & Patents department has been scanning all commonly used sales platforms such as Alibaba and Made-in-China.com for counterfeit versions of WIKA instruments. It currently deletes 1,400 offers from these portals every year. In the past, there used to be more than twice as many, and in 2018 there were over 4,000 – clearly, the clamp-down on the work of counterfeiters on the web is having an impact.
Note
Would you like to find out more about WIKA? Then visit our website. You can find an introduction to the Plagiarius “award winners” on the website of Aktion Plagiarius.
Also read our blogs
Police took off counterfeit storage in Vietnam
Gotcha! Counterfeit devices in Malaysia