The International Anti Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC) and the City of London Police‘s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) have announced a joint effort to take down websites selling counterfeits through the IACC RogueBlock Program.
RogueBlock, the IACC’s voluntary collaboration with international payment providers, targets online counterfeiters by terminating merchant accounts that illicit websites use to receive payments. It has terminated more than 5,300 individual merchant accounts.
The PIPCU collaboration means going after the websites themselves through PIPCU’s Operation Ashiko. PIPCU has agreed to consider each website submission from RogueBlock that fall within its jurisdiction, such as .uk domain names.
Operation Ashiko aims to tackle the online trade in counterfeit goods and protect the integrity of the UK domain tree by suspending websites doing intellectual property crime. Operation Ashiko has suspended 20,000 websites by working with industry partners.
IACC President Bob Barchiesi said: “The agreement sends a clear message to counterfeiters that their illegal and deceitful actions will not be tolerated in London and beyond. It represents exactly the kind of multifaceted approach that the modern battlefield of counterfeiting requires. With the help of PIPCU, we can fight counterfeiters through their wallets and their websites.”
The agreement falls under the IACC and PIPCU’s memorandum of understanding (MOU), which was signed in September 2016. Detective Superintendent, Peter Ratcliffe, Head of the PIPCU said, “International partnerships are the key to tackling the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and by working with the International Anti Counterfeiting Coalition we aim to make the internet a hostile place for criminals to sell and distribute fake goods.”
About PIPCU
The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit is a specialist national police unit dedicated to the UK industries that produce legitimate physical goods and online and digital content from intellectual property crime. The operationally independent unit was launched in September 2013 with funding from the Intellectual Property Office (IPO). The unit is based within the Economic Crime Directorate of the City of London Police, the National Policing Lead for Fraud.
