The resale market, where people sell rare trainers and t-shirts for thousands of pounds, is struggling to stop scammers with fake items.
While 11am on a Thursday sounds like most people’s first coffee break, for some it’s a mad dash to get £160 Supreme hoodies before they sell out in a tenth of a second.
But snapping up these expensive items from official sellers isn’t the end of the story. A lot of exclusive streetwear finds its way onto a huge secondary market to be resold to those who weren’t quick enough the first time.
These sales take place on multiple platforms. Many happen in Facebook groups of more than 100,000 members. Others occur on apps like Depop, Bump and Grailed.
For people who go to these places for a second chance to grab their dream trainers, there is a risk they may not receive the genuine article.
A survey carried out by CTRL ALT with one such group, the Basement, found that 43% of those who answered had bought a counterfeit item.
And for people like Joseph Groves, a 20-year-old student fashion buyer in London, fakes in the resale community are becoming a much bigger issue.
“They are sometimes so good now that you can get six months down the line and only find out [your trainers are fake] when someone, who has a pair themselves, spots an obscure mistake.”
Fashion brands have recently started previewing high-ticket items up to half a year before release, using that time to send samples to reviewers. According to Joseph, these samples can find their way to factories in China, giving them a head start manufacturing counterfeits.
“Come launch day there’s a flood of replica models ready to be sold to unknowing customers,” he says.
There have been several reports of fights and stabbings over sales and queuing for exclusive shoes both here and in the United States.
Yet Joseph, who has more than 50 pairs of trainers stacked around his bedroom, doesn’t believe the authorities should be getting involved in online marketplaces.
“I think there are more important things they should be focused on. It’s a conscious decision to buy these shoes so people accept the risk, but be careful and be smart about selling or buying. If you’ve never met this person, bring a friend or do it in a coffee shop or bank.”
Since he started buying and selling streetwear at the age of 13, Joseph has never been sent a fake. He admits he would pay a little more for items from sellers he’s used before because he already trusts them over unknown, cheaper sellers.
However, for people new to the resale market, he advises to research thoroughly and get multiple opinions on items.
“Never rush into buying." he says. "Having a group of friends with similar interests in your style means you can ask before pulling the trigger. Also, by buying close to the original release, there will be more pictures and conversations about the item, but if it came out a while ago then look at YouTube videos of unboxing to compare.”
All fake streetwear items are part of the broader issue of global counterfeit clothing and shoes. The problem is so large the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) estimated the total worth of goods to be more than $461 billion – 2.5% of total world trade.
A number of organisations and charities have been set up to fight this. The Anti-Counterfeiting Group (ACG), a not-for-profit organisation launched in 1980, represents UK and international brands against counterfeiters.
Phil Lewis, director general of the ACG, strongly believes educating enforcement agencies can help them identify new fashion brands sold in the streetwear community.
“With our intellectual property learning days, the enforcement agencies come along and learn from brands, who set-up stalls, about their products and what to look out for.
“I do really feel bad for these new fashion brands because they suffer quite considerably before they even know they have a problem, as these factories in South East Asia are quick in picking up on the latest hyped trends.”
Phil, who landed the top job at the ACG in July 2018, reveals that they have had limited success in stopping Facebook scammers.
“Members of our team have infiltrated certain groups and brought individuals to our attention, but social media is impossible to police. Catching these people is like playing whack-a-mole, you get one and another appears somewhere else.”
In fact, Phil also believes it’s a potentially more lucrative business for some than selling drugs: “It’s a huge international form of criminality and compared to selling illegal substances the profit margin, especially on these hyped items, is arguably much higher, while penalties of goods seizure and fines are much lower.”
One way some fashion brands try to throw counterfeiters off is through unique identifiers, often codes or hidden features on the product that will be unaware to counterfeiters until after being sold.
Phil advises new brands to decide if regularly changing a unique identifier is cost effective for them, “but the best course of action is to give as much information to trading enforcers so they can identify counterfeits when they are seized”.
Between the end of 2015 and 2018, there were more than 1484 cases of counterfeit items that were seized in London boroughs.
According to the CTRL survey, most respondents who had been sold fakes had been sent great quality replicas. Other causes include fake pictures and inadequate research.
Chris Taylor, 23, is a streetwear designer who launched his brand “Norven” back in 2018. He believes the online promotion of limited products by celebrities, models and social media influencers is partly to blame for the rise of counterfeits.
“These people see pictures of streetwear and high-fashion runways and want to capitalise on it, so they’re watching out for what’s coming each month and producing more and more.”
Designers struggle to get patents for clothing without innovative technology built in. This has blurred the line between inspiration and copying.
“Sometimes I’ve looked at certain designs and thought I can’t really do that because it just looks too similar to existing products,” Chris says. “I was recently in a big high street chain store and saw them selling see-through bags for women with quotation marks across the side, which is clearly copying Virgil Abloh’s Off-White brand.
“It’s very interesting that this is allowed but manufacturing a copy of a backpack and selling it on Facebook isn’t and is ripping people off.”
Chris, whose brand’s hoodies sell for £50 on his website, believes that a fundamental issue with fake streetwear is people not taking personal responsibility.
“A friend of mine who’s not an expert about streetwear got some shoes from a website,” Chris explains. After receiving photos of the shoes, Chris had to explain to his friend they were fakes.
“Now he wants to get rid of them himself, so he’s going to put them straight back into the market and could scam someone else who thinks they’re real”.
Now, the resale community is torn on what can be done to stop fakes and replicas being sold on Facebook and apps. Some call for stricter counterfeit laws, while others think more unique identifiers like codes that can be entered on websites like with Stone Island should be used more.
Yet not a single individual of the 240 people surveyed believed counterfeits can be eliminated from the market entirely. Many argue the increasing risk is why middlemen companies like StockX, which verifies items before taking a cut of the final sale price, are doing so well.
So before you blindly hand over £500 to a guy in a McDonald’s car park for a pair of the new Yeezy's that may have been coloured in with a highlighter, you’d best join some Facebook groups and ask the experts.
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