Jail sentences for sellers of fake fruit logos

Thirteen people who sold more than 1 million fake Dole, Sunkist and Zespri logos to fruit vendors have been jailed, the Pudong New Area People’s Court said.

They received sentences from five months with a five-month reprieve to two years and eight months.

They were found to have made and sold nearly 1.1 million fake brand stickers.

A man surnamed Ji, who was given the harshest sentence, sold fake stickers at his store and via the Internet. He was caught by police on May 25 at his store, and 141,000 stickers were seized. Police found he had already sold more than 40,000 fake stickers.

The court said the 13, who were tried in six separate cases, had stores in wet markets and fruit wholesale markets. Their customers were fruit vendors hoping to raise prices by pretending their fruit was imported and of high quality. The defendants also opened online stores.

“They infringed intellectual property rights, which was bad for improving the business environment,” said judge Xu Jun. He said that from 2015 to 2017, the court had heard 11,787 cases relating to intellectual property right infringement, accounting for nearly 40 percent of such cases heard by city courts.