The curious case of the handlebar bag scam
This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal everyday life in much of Asia for decades. Any successful brand will see counterfeits and, indeed, sometimes before the quality brand even launches. A prestige brand’s logo will be thrown on some cheap, low-quality anonymous thing, and ordering online you are just as likely to get a counterfeit as the real thing.<p>Now it goes beyond physical products to media too; another example is blogs these days. Someone finds a successful blog, pays some developing-world person on a freelancer platform to rewrite every post just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown, and then puts the counterfeit site up with a heavy load of SEO and advertising. This started with recipe blogs – that cajun cooking site that claims to be by a born and bred Louisianan has grammatical mistakes suggesting an Eastern European or Southeast Asian author – but is now spreading through all kinds of other hobbies and interests. With recipe blogs, this phenomenon is now so mature that counterfeiters are copying from previous counterfeits.