Amazon has announced the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX), an industry collaboration designed to make shopping safer and more difficult for counterfeiters to sell their goods. ACX allows participating stores to share information about confirmed counterfeiters who attempted to use their services to try to sell counterfeit products.

By sharing information about these counterfeiters, ACX participants can identify and stop perpetrators more quickly than they would in the absence of this collaborative data sharing. In accordance with industry standards and best practices, an independent third party provides anonymised access for participants to share and receive information. Sharing data for a better retail experience ACX has enabled regular information sharing and participants use this information in their ongoing efforts to detect and address counterfeiting, improve their individual risk evaluation systems, and make more robust referrals to law enforcement so bad actors can be held accountable.

Through ACX, Amazon has already detected hundreds of matching accounts where the same counterfeiter tried to create selling accounts on Amazon and at least one other store operator. The power of ACX comes from the fact that as soon as one of the participating stores catches a counterfeiter and shares the account information through the exchange, all the other stores participating in ACX can know about that counterfeiter and can stop them even more quickly in their store. Each participant makes its own independent decisions about whether and how to use the information in ACX.

Amazon’s representatives said that they want their customers to have confidence in their shopping experience and for brands to know they are protected from counterfeits. As they laid out in their blueprint for private and public sector partnership to stop counterfeiters, they think it is critical to share information about confirmed counterfeiters to help the entire industry stop these criminals earlier. Also commenting on this development, official from the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center said that this is an opening salvo in a much larger battle against counterfeiters and criminal organisations, and the effort will need even greater participation, from all industries and sectors, to reach its full potential.

They look forward to supporting this momentous effort with all of the tools that the IPR Center brings to bear. Industry collaboration is key Amazon has been working with other members of ACX to pilot the exchange, ensure the appropriate guardrails, and design a scalable way to broaden participation to additional companies interested in stopping counterfeiters. Private sector partnerships around data sharing are crucial to combating counterfeiting.

Amazon invites other retailers and marketplace service providers to join the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange and collaborate with the founding members to further strengthen the industry’s collective efforts against counterfeiters. Through ACX, counterfeiters and criminal organisations are on notice that the private sector is aligning against them and working to protect consumers and rights owners across the retail industry. .