Counterfeit protection in 2026

Counterfeit Protection in 2026: Notes from the UNIFAB European Forum

The fight against counterfeits used to be mostly about borders. A shipment of fakes left a factory in one country, moved through customs, hit a warehouse, got distributed, and ended up on a shelf or a marketplace. The job for brands and enforcement agencies was to intercept the supply chain. Most of the playbooks built over the last twenty years assumed that model.

That model still applies. It just isn't enough anymore. The newer threat isn't about logistics. It's about what shoppers see and believe in the seconds before they decide to buy.

This was the throughline at the recent UNIFAB (Union des Fabricants) European Forum on Intellectual Property in Paris, where industry leaders gathered to work through how to protect intellectual property in a landscape that's getting more sophisticated and more politically charged. Olivia Mazzucotelli, Head of Brand & Industry Relations at TikTok Shop, joined experts from Interpol, French Customs, the University of Strasbourg, the Spanish National Office, and Authentix to address one question: how do businesses and institutions get ahead of counterfeit activity as Europe becomes a more prominent target?

The short version of the answer that came out of the forum is that you have to act earlier and faster, and you have to do it across the whole stack. The longer version is what the rest of this post is about.

What's actually changed about the threat

A few things have shifted in the last few years that make the older playbooks insufficient on their own.

The first is speed. A counterfeit operation used to need months of preparation to get fakes into market. Now a viral video can drive enough demand for a knock-off product that a counterfeiter can spin up listings, source inventory, and start shipping within weeks. The window between a brand getting hot and a wave of fakes appearing has collapsed.

The second is geopolitics. Trade tensions and shifting policy positions have created openings for counterfeit narratives that didn't exist before. When tariffs change quickly, when public conversations about manufacturing get politically charged, the openings for misinformation about where products are actually made get wider. That's not theoretical. The forum surfaced a specific recent pattern: viral videos claiming that well-known luxury goods are produced in unexpected regions, redirecting shoppers toward alternative products. Many of those alternatives turn out to be counterfeit. Shoppers who think they've discovered an insider sourcing tip are often being routed straight into a fraud.

The third is content velocity. The volume of product-related video being created and shared every day is now too high for any single team to monitor manually. The job has moved from intercepting fakes after they appear to detecting suspicious activity before it goes viral. That's a different operating model and a different technology stack.

The four-pillar defense Mazzucotelli laid out

The framework she shared at the forum is built on four layers that work together. Each one fails on its own. Together, they're what a credible defense against counterfeit activity looks like for a marketplace at scale.

Seller verification. The first filter is at the entrance. Only legitimate businesses get to operate as sellers on the platform in the first place, and the verification process is designed to make impersonation hard. This catches a meaningful share of counterfeit attempts before they ever reach a listing, because the operations that traffic in fakes usually don't want to put real business documents on file.

Accessible reporting tools. When a rights holder spots an issue, they need a fast and clear way to flag it. The Intellectual Property Protection Center (IPPC) is the dedicated reporting channel, and the design choice that matters is that it's accessible. A reporting tool that requires a lawyer to navigate doesn't actually help. The faster a brand can flag something, the faster it comes down.

Proactive detection. This is the layer that's done most of the heavy lifting in the last two years. Detection technology now identifies and removes suspicious listings before they go live, not after a complaint surfaces. The work is increasingly machine-driven, with human moderation focused on the edge cases the automation can't resolve. The right read on this isn't that the technology replaces enforcement. It's that the technology widens the net so enforcement can focus where it matters most.

Collaboration with brands, rights holders, and public authorities. The fourth pillar is the one that's hardest to operationalize and most important. No single platform can solve counterfeiting alone. The brands that protect themselves best are the ones that share signals back to the platforms they sell on, work directly with enforcement agencies, and stay engaged with industry organizations like UNIFAB. The platforms that protect their ecosystem best are the ones that share their detection signals with brands and authorities in the other direction.

The point of structuring the defense in layers is that no single layer is foolproof. Verification screens out most of the bad actors, but some get through. Reporting tools catch a lot, but only the ones that get reported. Proactive detection catches the patterns it knows to look for, but new patterns appear constantly. Collaboration is what fills the gaps the other three leave behind.

Why misinformation is now part of the IP fight

One of the more notable shifts in Mazzucotelli's framing was how prominent misinformation has become in the counterfeit landscape. "When it comes to intellectual property, our position is very clear," she said. "Protecting consumers, brands, creators, and sellers against counterfeit content and products is an absolute priority."

The connection between misinformation and counterfeits used to be loose. People bought fakes because they wanted a cheaper version of the real thing. Now people increasingly buy fakes because a viral video convinced them the cheap version is actually the same factory output as the expensive one, just sold without the brand markup. The narrative is wrong, but it spreads faster than anyone can correct it.

That makes the counter-effort partly an awareness one. Mazzucotelli pointed to the platform's investment in awareness campaigns: "We deploy sophisticated and effective detection means: we must react quickly because today, a single viral video can have a global impact. And we also support anti-counterfeiting awareness campaigns on TikTok to counterbalance these misleading contents, particularly the campaigns of Unifab, INTA and, in the near future, an educational campaign by ASOP EU (Alliance for Safe online Pharmacy in the EU), to raise awareness about the rising tide of fake medicines."

Fake medicines are the example that crystallizes the stakes. A fake handbag is a financial harm to the brand and a quality disappointment for the buyer. A fake medication can be lethal. The same misinformation infrastructure that enables one enables the other, which is why the awareness piece has moved from optional to essential.

What this means for brands operating online

A few practical takeaways for brands evaluating their own counterfeit protection in 2026.

Speed of detection now matters more than the depth of the eventual takedown. A counterfeit listing that goes live for two weeks before being removed has already served most of its commercial purpose. The brands with the lowest counterfeit damage in any given quarter aren't usually the ones with the most aggressive legal teams. They're the ones with the fastest signal pipeline from "we noticed this pattern" to "the platform took it down."

Reporting tools are most useful when brands actually use them. The IPPC and equivalent programs on other platforms exist because no platform can monitor every brand's intellectual property without help. The brands that get the fastest response are the ones that file complete, well-documented reports with clear evidence. The brands that file ambiguous or thin reports get slower turnaround because the platform team has to do more verification work.

Misinformation monitoring has moved from a corporate communications function to a brand protection function. If the videos circulating about your category are inaccurate, the counterfeit problem follows the misinformation problem with a lag. Watching for narrative shifts is now part of staying ahead of fakes.

Collaboration scales better than enforcement. A brand acting alone catches some fakes. A brand working alongside the platforms it sells on, the enforcement agencies in its key markets, and the industry groups in its category catches meaningfully more, because the signal sharing makes every party's detection sharper.

What's worth being honest about

The fight against counterfeits is not winnable in any final sense. The pattern looks more like vaccination than like surgery. You build defenses, you raise the cost for bad actors, you intercept what you can, and you accept that new threats will keep appearing.

What's changing is the rate at which new threats appear, and what that demands from the systems built to respond. Manual processes don't scale. Reactive enforcement loses ground. Brands that haven't updated their protection model in five years are protecting themselves against the threat landscape of five years ago, not the one they're actually operating in.

The forum's clearest message was the one that gets repeated at every counterfeit-focused gathering and is somehow always the most actionable: no single entity can do this alone. The brands, platforms, agencies, and industry groups that share signals, align strategies, and run awareness campaigns together are the ones who stay ahead. The ones who don't keep losing ground.

The takeaway

Counterfeit protection in 2026 is a content problem as much as a logistics one, a misinformation problem as much as a fraud one, and a collaboration problem as much as a technology one. The four-pillar approach (verification, reporting tools, proactive detection, and collaboration) is the operating model that scales with the threat. The brands and platforms that invest in all four layers stay ahead. The ones that lean on any one of them in isolation get surprised by how fast the threat evolves around them.

Events like the UNIFAB European Forum exist because the conversation has to keep moving. The threat isn't standing still, and neither can the response.

Why this matters for TikTok Shop brands and agencies

If you sell branded products on TikTok Shop, the four-pillar model is not an abstract framework. It is a checklist for how you defend your shop and your creator program. Get verified as an Official Shop so shoppers see the blue checkmark on every PDP and LIVE. Use the IPPC actively, with well-documented reports. Treat your authenticated creator content as part of your provenance trail, because the more legitimate brand impressions are in the feed, the more counterfeit listings stand out by contrast.

Hubfluence keeps your creator program organized in one place so the legitimate content trail is easy to evidence. Sourcing creators happens inside the creator database, sample shipments to authenticated creators flow through the sample manager, and GMV attribution ties every approved video back to the shop that actually owns the brand. That cross-program visibility is exactly what makes it easier to spot anomalies and react quickly when something off-pattern shows up.

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