Buyer Beware: Designer Impostors Fund Human Trafficking Rings

If you've been trolling the Internet for deals this holiday season, you might have found some pretty unbelievable ones -- like Tiffany and Co. jewelry for $30 or Ugg boots for $20. But buyer beware! These designer impostor web malls are doing more than ripping off you and and some high-end corporate brands. They're funding human trafficking rings with cash from online bargain-hunters.

Yesterday, Scotland Yard shut down over 1,000 online shopping websites, claiming to sell a range of designer products at deeply discounted prices. The sites were run by a network of Asia-based gangs who offered online deals that were literally too good to be true. When a customer bought Burberry or Tiffany online with a credit card, they'd sometimes receive cheap counterfeit jewelry and sometimes nothing at all. As a bonus, the gangs stole the identities of some of their customers. But the true criminal kicker in this scam was that revenues from these sites were going to fund the gangs' other activities -- specifically, human trafficking and drug smuggling. Who would have thought that the Gucci handbag you got on "sale" for $50 would fund slavery in Asia?

The business model these gangs have set up is not unheard of or even unusual. It's often the case that large criminal gangs or organized criminal rings will engage in multiple types of criminal activity. So a gang might be trafficking people in commercial sex, and also be transporting cocaine, running Internet scams, and stealing identities. In some cases, the activities are directly related, like groups that traffic women for sex and sell pornography made of those women while being sold for sex. Other times, such in this case, the criminal activities are only connected by funding. So you could be buying something seemingly unrelated to slavery, like cocaine or designer impostor blue jeans, and actually be funding a trafficking operation.

The fact that this sting operation alone shut down 1000 of these sites is a true "buyer beware" warning. This holiday season, millions of people will shop online, looking for good deals on gifts for their friends and family. And there's nothing wrong with a good deal. But cheap, impostor crap (or no crap at all) that funds human trafficking operations is a bad deal all around. No one wants to get scammed and no one wants to support slavery. So be careful out there, and educate yourself about the websites you visit and buy from.

For suggestions about where to buy better holiday gifts that don't finance human trafficking, check out the Shop for Change Holiday Gift Guide.

Photo credit: priceminister