Shanghai police crack down on intellectual property rights infringements

Zhu Yuting
Police have busted gangs for counterfeiting imported chocolate, popular gaming figurines and plagiarized online novels.
Zhu Yuting

Chocolate, game figurines and online novels were found to be targets of criminal suspects in intellectual property rights infringements, Shanghai police unveiled on Wednesday, the World Intellectual Property Day.

Police officers in Shanghai's suburban Jiading District cracked down on a gang with 12 members for producing and selling counterfeit chocolate.

The gang had produced chocolate in a packing house with low-cost chocolate beans as raw materials since July 2021. They imitated the appearance and taste of the original chocolate.

Another gang member was in charge of making counterfeit packaging in his print shop.

They then sold the chocolate on e-commercial platforms priced between 50 yuan (US$7.22) to 76 yuan for each box, which was less than half the market price, police said.

Five of the 12 were apprehended by Jiading police and others were placed under criminal coercive measures.

About 1,000 boxes of counterfeit chocolate were seized with an estimated value of 15 million yuan.

Police officers cautioned buyers to shop through regular and qualified platforms.

Shanghai police crack down on intellectual property rights infringements
Zhu Yuting / SHINE

The counterfeit chocolate

Shanghai police crack down on intellectual property rights infringements
Zhu Yuting / SHINE

The genuine chocolate

In addition to chocolate, the counterfeit items included renowned game figurines, such as Super Mario characters.

About 30,000 counterfeit game-role collections were seized by Jing'an police with an estimated value of 1.5 million yuan.

Shanghai police have increased their protection of Intellectual property rights in recent years.

Since the beginning of the year, local police officers have cracked down on 450 cases relating to IPR infringement.

The police discovered that infringements happened in all walks of life.

In one case, a gang with more than 30 members illegally obtained more than 280 million yuan through selling novels that they illegally copied from other websites, according to Minhang police.

The gang then put the novels on their self-developed software for free, to attract readers to click on advertisements when reading those books. The traffic from these clicks is how the gang made their profit.

As of now, three of the gang members has been arrested, while the remainder were placed under criminal coercive measures.

Shanghai police crack down on intellectual property rights infringements
Zhu Yuting / SHINE

The infringed game figures.


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