Fake surgical, designer facemasks seized by US customs

US customs have intercepted shipments of counterfeit surgical and designer face masks in another example of pandemic-driven illicit trade.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in Louisville, Kentucky, seized a shipment of 5,700 designer masks arriving from Vietnam claiming to be from fashion designers including Coach, Tory Burke, Chanel and others. If these items were real, they would have been more than $1.4m, said the agency.

Meanwhile, CBP in Cincinnati, Ohio, made what it described as a significant seizure of counterfeit 3M surgical masks that were packaged advertising protection against communicable respiratory diseases.

The intercepted shipment from China contained 21 shipping boxes of masks labelled as 3M Mask Model 1860 and indicating they were made in the USA although they were being imported from a consumer electronics company in Shenzhen, China.

The masks were headed to a sales company in Union City, California, and would have had a retail price of $65,520 had they been genuine.