The number
In 2025, EU customs detained 196 million counterfeit items with an estimated value of €6.3 billion. That is 67% higher than 2024, and 29% above the previous record set in 2023.
This is the annual joint report from the European Commission and the EU Intellectual Property Office, and it is the single best-scale datapoint on the counterfeit problem currently available.
The part most brand owners will miss
The headline is the total. The category breakdown is the actionable part:
| Category | Share of detained articles |
|---|---|
| CDs / DVDs | 29.30% |
| Toys | 19.65% |
| Labels, tags and stickers | 12.82% |
| Cigarettes | 6.19% |
| Games | 3.88% |
| Clothing | 2.62% |
Look at the third row again. Labels, tags and stickers were the third-largest category of counterfeit item detained in the entire European Union — ahead of cigarettes.
That is a packaging problem, not a product problem. A counterfeit label is cheap to produce, trivially easy to apply to a genuine product, and it is the vector through which a fake gets sold as the real thing. It is also the hardest thing for a consumer to check: a hologram can be copied, a serial number can be guessed, a printed code can be reprinted — but a label is only as good as the system behind it.
What enforcement can and cannot do
Read the number carefully, because it contains a trap.
Every one of those 196 million items was caught in a container, at a border, before it reached a shop. That is enforcement working as intended. It is also enforcement working at the last possible moment.
Consider what happened before the seizure. The fakes were manufactured. They were shipped. They were distributed. They were sold. They were bought by consumers who had no way of knowing. Only then did the supply chain intercept them — and only the shipment that got caught. The ones that got through are not counted in this figure at all.
The 196 million is the visible fraction of the problem, and the visible fraction is always the fraction that was unlucky enough to be inspected.
The gap enforcement leaves open
Enforcement is expensive, slow, and geographically arbitrary. A seizure in Rotterdam does nothing about the same counterfeit on a marketplace in another jurisdiction, and it tells the brand nothing about who bought it or where.
What enforcement cannot do is reach the consumer. And the consumer is where a brand's reputation, its repeat purchase rate, and its exposure to a safety recall actually live.
The part that is measurable
There is a second problem with the €6.3 billion figure that a brand owner should hold onto.
Those detained goods were, in economic terms, inventory. They had a value to the counterfeiters. That value was destroyed at the border. Which means the counterfeiters will ship more — and they will price that risk into the trade, which means the counterfeit gets cheaper and the market gets bigger.
Seizures are necessary and they are not sufficient.
What a brand can do in parallel
The complement to enforcement is a signal the brand itself owns: one that arrives from the point of sale rather than from the point of interception, and that identifies the individual unit rather than the shipment.
- A consumer scans the product. They find out instantly whether it is genuine.
- The brand learns who bought it, where, and when — data enforcement never produces.
- A second scan from somewhere unexpected is a grey-market signal, not just a complaint.
- If a batch turns out to be compromised, the brand can name the affected units rather than the affected shipments.
The enforcement statistic above is the size of the problem. The second number — how many of your products a consumer can verify themselves, and how many of those verifications come back — is the size of your defence, and today very few brands can even measure it.
Source and caveats
Figures are from the joint European Commission / EUIPO annual report on customs detention of counterfeit goods. Seizure counts are not directly comparable across years or jurisdictions: methodology differs, some authorities count by shipment and others by item, and detained value is an estimate rather than a sale price.
Next week: what happens when a brand decides to fix this itself.