Police cut short fake shaver sales
A total of 33 suspects have been seized of manufacturing and selling fake Phillips products, Shanghai police said on Wednesday.
Since 2018, the suspects made over 30 million yuan (US$4.4 million) from producing and selling over 300,000 fake electric shavers and toothbrushes, police in Qingpu District said.
The investigation began in February this year when an online shop was found selling two products at prices obviously lower than normal. The shop was selling over 100 items a day that were proved to be fake.
The seller purchased the fake products from Chen, a woman living in Beijing who ran at least 10 similar Internet shops herself. The products were made in Hebei Province, assembled with cheap parts purchased from Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian provinces. The fakes were sold to wholesalers by 40 to 200 yuan, and the prices consumers paid were about half of the market price of the original.
Suspects were rounded up in Beijing and Hebei and Jiangsu provinces on June 28 with over 300,000 fake products and parts seized, together with a great number of plastic packaging machines, police said.
Cai Haifeng, the officer who led a raid in Hebei Province, said the fakes were produced in a small town in Hebei.
“Hygienic standards were very low, and the underground factories met no standards for manufacturing goods at all,” he said.
Phillips said that the fakes were a different quality to the authentic ones in many regards. The fake shavers are lighter and have a sharper sound, and the fake toothbrush heads, unlike the authentic ones, never fade, a feature to remind customers to change the head.
The investigation is still underway.
A place in Hebei Province where the fake products were manufactured
