Fake Viagra, anabolic steroids, perfumes and luxury goods flood into EU from AsiaBy Gabriel Ronay
The flow of counterfeit eastern luxury goods and sexual and athletic performance-enhancing medications into the European market has become a flood. Czech customs officers intercepted in the post and destroyed one tonne of fake Viagra, Cialis and anabolic steroid pills at Kralupy nad Vltavou, near Prague. Packages mailed from Hong Kong and India to addresses in the Czech Republic were detected by customs officers using X-ray machines.
Together with the genuine article, fake Viagra, Cialis and other drugs promising heightened sexual performance are big business on the internet. Free samples and special offers tempt those who prefer an anonymous online supplier to an embarrassing face-to-face request for a prescription from their GP. You can have 10 Viagra and 10 Cialis pills, advertised as "male enhancement" and "female enhancement" pills, for under £39 from one of the online drugstores.
But Stanislav Havlicek, chairman of the Czech Chamber of Apothecaries, warns that, because of the flood of Indian and Chinese-manufactured fake Viagra on the internet "shoppers cannot know what's inside the blue pills. It may be poison. Most commonly the pills have absolutely no effect. But in the worse case, the user could even die from adverse reaction to some noxious component of the fake pill."
In an equally worrying development, famous-name perfumes, clothes and shoes from Middle and Far Eastern counterfeiters have now cornered the luxury end of the fake goods market, thanks the open frontiers of the European Union.
Last month, 20 tonnes of contraband fake perfumes were discovered by Romanian frontier guards in a Turkish articulated lorry at Romania's Arad crossing point into Hungary. The huge consignment was on its way to a Belgian port, with Britain as its final destination.
By choice, the smugglers' key transit route for fake luxury goods, cigarettes and drugs is now through Romania and Bulgaria. Romania has become the favoured route of Turkish smugglers, overtaking the Greece-Albania link. According to Max-Peter Ratzel, the director of Europol, police corruption, low pay and judicial sleaze in the Balkan countries are behind this development. Of late, however, there have been some notable Romanian police successes.
Joan Marea, spokesman for the Arad frontier police in Romania, said that the Turkish smugglers are becoming ever more inventive in disguising their contraband. "In the case in point, 900 kg of liquid soap, the Turkish-registered HGV lorry's declared load, covered 20 tonnes of fake famous-brand perfumes," he said.
In April an even bigger consignment of fake famous-name clothes en route to a German department store was detained by Arad customs officers. These are but a fraction of luxury goods counterfeited on a massive scale in the East that flood into the European Union.
The Chinese counterfeit industry's European end can be observed in full swing at Budapest's sprawling Chinese Market in the Jozsefvaros district. It offers a cornucopia of fake Western goods of famous labels, weapons and even Nazi memorabilia for well-heeled visiting German collectors.
Walking along some of its aisles, an overabundance of fake luxury goods attract the attention of shoppers. The other day, 6000 pairs of Prada and other famous-label shoes, displayed in 12 pavilions, were confiscated by police. According to Jeno Sipos, Budapest customs and excise spokesman, the shoes, worth more than 100 million forints (£350,000), were fakes of unknown manufacture.
But despite the sporadic police and customs spot checks, there is a surfeit of fake luxury goods going at bargain basement prices at Budapest's Chinese Market.
