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BEIJING - Beijing is battling to stamp out illegal sales of 2008 Olympic merchandise on dozens of unauthorised websites seeking to cash in on the Chinese public's Games fervour, local media reported.
Authorities had investigated about 80 commercial and personal websites selling fake Olympic merchandise, or lacking licences to sell the legitimate product, the Beijing Youth Daily said, citing an Olympic e-commerce official.
"The supply channels on these illegal websites are chaotic," the paper quoted Xie Funing, a spokesman with the Olympic E-commerce Operation Centre, as saying.
Many websites lacked legal proof of the origins of their products, while others had "exploited consumers' urgency to buy (merchandise) by raising prices and ripping them off," Xie said.
Beijing Olympic organisers have targeted making $70 million (NZ$91.5) from merchandising from the 2008 Games, from a range of about 4,000 products.
But despite authorities making a point of cracking down on Olympic-related forgery, local media reports of police busting fake Games souvenir makers and street pedlars are common.
Law enforcement agencies seized nearly 30,000 finished or half-finished Olympic fakes in the capital earlier this year, and arrested a man in the southern island province of Hainan who cheated internet users out of a suspected 400,000 yuan (NZ$70,000) through a fake version of the official Games website.
China is considered the world's most prolific counterfeiter, causing billions of dollars in lost sales to makers of everything from music and movie DVDs, designer clothes and consumer electronics and software.
- REUTERS
