In the first month of 2020, following the missions carried out at the crossing points and in the area of competence, the border guards within the territorial structures of the Border Police, together with other authorities with competences in the field, discovered about 30,000 susceptible goods to be counterfeit, bearing international trade marks as follows:
- 10,600 articles of clothing;
- 5,300 pieces of cosmetics and perfumery;
- 960 pieces of toys;
- 8,500 pairs of shoes;
- 380 leather goods;
- 3,700 other products
In the same period of 2019, over 1,100 articles of clothing, 585 pairs of footwear and 757 cosmetics and perfumery products were discovered, with a substantial increase in January of this year in all the above-mentioned categories.In all cases, the goods were collected for confiscation and sent to the trademark owner for expert advice. Most of the goods likely to be counterfeit were found at the Romanian-Bulgarian border, in the area of jurisdiction of the Territorial Inspectorate of the Giurgiu Border Police, being products brought from Turkey to Romania or countries from western Europe.
We specify that the counterfeit goods cannot be evaluated (they are worthless goods), they will be destroyed after the detention, according to the legal provisions, but if they had been marketed as original products it would have been worth over 6,000,000 lei.In all cases, the border guards found 95 persons - Turkish, Romanian and Bulgarian citizens - who tried to illegally introduce counterfeit products in the country and are investigating the commission of the crime of “unlawful circulation of a product carrying a mark identical or similar to the registered trademark for identical or similar products” fact provided and punished by art. 90, paragraph 1, lit. b of Law 84/1998, as subsequently amended and supplemented.
