Alibaba sees returns of suspected fake goods fall

The ratio of product return requests of goods bought on Alibaba’s online shopping portal Taobao last year on suspicion of them being knockoffs dropped 29 percent year-on-year, the e-commerce giant said in a report published on Wednesday.

Out of every 10,000 requests to return products last year, 1.49 were initiated as consumers suspected the goods were counterfeit, compared with 2.1 in the previous year, according to the 2017 Alibaba Intellectual Property Protection Annual Report.

The report is the first since Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, called for counterfeit goods to be tackled in the same way as drunken driving early last year.

It also said 97 percent of the products that Alibaba took the initiative to remove from the online platform on suspicion of infringing intellectual property rights were removed immediately before any transactions took place.

Altogether 240,000 Taobao stores were closed last year on suspicion of selling fake goods, compared with 180,000 in the previous year, according to the report.

Using big data technology, the group scanned nearly two billion products a day on the platform to spot questionable items as well as 600 million pictures that online dealers published, said Zheng Junfang, Alibaba’s chief platform governance officer.

Last year, Alibaba tipped off police about 1,910 cases of suspected sales or production of counterfeit goods, which resulted in police officers catching 1,606 suspects, according to the report. The amount involved in the cases was roughly 430 million yuan ($66 million).