US Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 79 million counterfeit items in fiscal year 2025, the year that ran from October 2024 to September 2025. Had those goods been genuine, they would have carried a retail value of more than $7.3 billion. Fashion sits at the centre of that count, since CBP lists handbags, wallets, apparel, footwear, watches and jewellery among the products at higher risk of counterfeiting. The numbers show how much larger the problem became in a single year and how the way fakes reach the United States changed.
The Headline Numbers
A written submission to the House Judiciary Committee’s intellectual property subcommittee, citing CBP data, puts fiscal year 2024 at roughly 32 million items and $5.4 billion. The number of items therefore rose about two and a half times in a year, while their value rose about 35 percent. Dividing CBP’s totals gives an average of about $93 of retail value per item in 2025, against about $169 the year before. The seizures shifted towards cheaper goods.
CBP values seizures at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of the genuine product, so the totals measure the scale of enforcement and do not measure sales a brand lost. Globally, the OECD and EUIPO valued trade in counterfeit goods at $467 billion in 2021, about 2.3 percent of world imports.
Which Fashion Categories Lead
CBP’s FY2025 statistics show that over the last four years, jewellery, watches and handbags and wallets have led seizures by retail value, in that order. By count, handbags and wallets led in fiscal year 2024 with 5,132,402 items, or 15.8 percent of all intellectual property seizures. CBP listed counterfeit clothing among the top seized items in fiscal year 2025 as well.
A single December 2025 case shows what the numbers look like in practice. Officers in Louisville opened parcels from Hong Kong and found 400 Cartier watches along with Moncler and Chrome Hearts hats, and a parcel from Taiwan held 160 counterfeit Rolex watches. The combined retail value of the three shipments exceeded $18.6 million.
Where the Goods Come From
China and Hong Kong supplied about 67 percent of the quantity CBP seized in fiscal year 2025: 39,874,536 items from China and 12,168,578 from Hong Kong. Seizures from Hong Kong alone carried a retail value of about $1.28 billion. The same congressional submission puts the two origins’ combined share at 88 percent in fiscal year 2024, which means it fell by about 21 points in a year.
The submission reads that drop as consistent with the end of the de minimis exemption, which had let low-value parcels enter without inspection. The United States suspended de minimis treatment for shipments from China and Hong Kong in May 2025 and extended the suspension to every country in August 2025. FLJ’s analysis of Shein and the UFLPA Entity List shows how large that channel had grown, with Shein and Temu accounting for between 48 and 52 percent of the 1.36 billion low-value parcels entering the country each year.
How the Goods Arrive
Commercial vessels carried 62 percent of the counterfeit items seized in fiscal year 2025, according to CBP’s counterfeit awareness page. The page breaks the quantities down by transport mode: 48,385,316 items by commercial vessel, 17,417,787 by express consignment, 8,697,228 by commercial air and 3,935,715 by all other modes. Express consignment, the courier channel behind many direct-to-consumer parcels, still moved more than 17 million fakes in the year.
What CBP Can Seize and What It Cannot
CBP acts on registered rights. It can seize and destroy imported goods that bear an infringing trademark or copyright that has been registered and then recorded with CBP through its e-Recordation programme. Other violations, including false country-of-origin markings and valuation problems, also trigger action. Recording a mark with CBP costs $190 per class, and a brand that skips it gives officers no recorded mark to enforce at the border. Rights holders can also report suspected violations through CBP’s e-Allegations system, and intellectual property reports made up 13 percent of all e-Allegations in fiscal year 2025.
The same rule leaves some copies outside the statistics. A garment that copies a design without using the original brand’s name or logo is a dupe and does not count as a counterfeit, and FLJ’s explainer on dupes and counterfeits sets out why the law treats the two differently. CBP’s seizure numbers therefore measure infringement of registered and recorded rights, a narrower category than all copying in fashion.
What the Numbers Mean for Brands
The 2025 figures send two messages. Seizure volume more than doubled, and the average value per item fell by almost half. Brands that want customs to act on the flood of cheaper goods need registered trademarks and a current CBP recordation for each of them, because officers act on the rights a record shows them.
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