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Protecting toy brands: taking down counterfeits with 91.1% effectiveness
In the fast-growing children’s product market, sellers of fakes create tens of thousands of listings passing counterfeits off as the original. Working with a major toy distributor, the BrandSecurity team cleared counterfeits from online channels
Published
12.05.26
Reading time
6 min
Counterfeits are gaining ground in the children's toy market
The children's product market is growing, and with it the scale of counterfeit toy distribution. Among the drivers of this explosive growth are weak regulation of cross-border trade and the absence of mandatory certification.
It's hard for manufacturers to track counterfeits on their own across thousands of new product listings. Marketplaces take steps to fight fakes, but these are often not enough.
The bigger picture is shaped by the rising number of Chinese toy sellers on Russian marketplaces — in a single year, the number of listings they created grew fourfold. Rights holders find them hard to counter: over 70% of Chinese sellers can't be identified in public registries. On top of that, they can obtain an "Original" badge based on formally submitted documents — at scale, marketplaces don't verify each product in detail.
Everyone loses to counterfeits: manufacturers and authorized distributors lose revenue, while consumers receive substandard and potentially dangerous products. This is especially critical for the children's toy category.
Any growing brand can run into fakes. Counterfeiting became a challenge for a major distributor of children's products and toys with a portfolio of popular international brands, too.
A threat to brands: tens of thousands of counterfeit listings
A threat to brands: tens of thousands of counterfeit listings
Amid e-commerce growth, the company faced mass posting of unauthorized product offers. Ozon led by number of violations: tens of thousands of listings with signs of counterfeiting were found there. At peak months, the number of violations exceeded 24,000. This put serious strain on the company's internal resources and reduced its share of official sales.
The company's objective:
Keep online sales channels clean, minimize the presence of counterfeits on marketplaces and social media, and reduce the overall volume of illegal product circulation under its key brands.
For this project, the company chose BrandSecurity.
The deciding factors were:
- years of experience working with major marketplaces;
- the ability not just to flag violations, but to drive them to takedown;
- transparent reporting and analytics for every case.
The solution: a system for monitoring and protecting intellectual property
The BrandSecurity team built a comprehensive Brand Protection system with several components.
Using its proprietary BrandSecurity Rocket platform, a team of analysts finds and logs violations across different channels, including:
- marketplaces;
- classified-ad sites;
- online stores;
- social media and messaging apps.
Within seconds, the system flags suspicious brand products on marketplaces and classified-ad sites. The BrandSecurity team can compare each product listing against a "whitelist" provided by the brand. If a seller isn't on the authorized list, the system marks the listing as potentially fraudulent.
Monitoring counterfeit toys
Monitoring built on a combination of automated algorithms and analysis — key decisions are made by BrandSecurity experts
Monitoring is built on a combination of automated algorithms and expert analysis: key decisions are made by BrandSecurity specialists. The system quickly detects suspicious listings, while specialists assess the threat level, gather evidence, and file complaints
Systematic complaint handling
Specialists file complaints through the marketplaces' official channels, track their status, and drive violations to takedown
Priority cleanup of the most popular product categories
When violations are high in volume, the first priority is to take down the counterfeits buyers are most likely to see. This makes it possible to reduce the visibility of fakes as much as possible in the shortest time
Founder of BrandSecurity
"Standard monitoring ends with the client being sent a list of links to violations. We go further: we take on the complaint process, engagement with marketplaces, and legal support in complex cases. We take down fakes and give the client full analytics — what was done and with what result"
The result: 119,919 violations removed in one year
Overall brand protection effectiveness reached 91.1%. Counterfeits under the key brands were removed by an average of 90%.
Results across the major platforms:
- On Ozon, 94.3% of violations were removed. The marketplace was the toughest front in the fight against counterfeits, with the number of violations reaching 112,970.
- On VK, 100% cleanup of the identified communities and posts was achieved.
- On Avito, 91.2% of illegal listings were removed.
What brand protection delivered for the toy manufacturer:
- Removal of a large volume of counterfeits and unauthorized sales.
- Reduced strain on the internal team — the BrandSecurity experts handled everything from monitoring to takedown.
- Control over online channels — buyers now see mostly legitimate listings, and the share of official sales is no longer diluted.
- Predictability and transparency — analytics and reporting make it possible to track the situation in real time.
Founder of BrandSecurity
“The sharp decline in new incidents confirms that the market responds to strict intellectual property enforcement. When unauthorized sellers see that counterfeit listings are being systematically blocked, they stop taking the risk. That is the key result: we did not just clean up the platforms, we changed market behavior.”
