THE SCOOP ON FAKE SNEAKERS

So how much fake stuff are you intercepting?

We intercept between 30 and 40 shipments a month of counterfeit footwear, mostly in commercial quantities. That is a huge number of shipments. When I started this job in 1988, we would get about one per week. And it was bells and whistles when we'd intercept a shipment of counterfeit shoes. Now,
I would wonder why it was so quiet if we didn't get one every single day of the week, 7 days a week.

Is the manufacture of fake apparel locally in Australia an unexpected development?

Not in the apparel business, that's always been the case.
All that's really happened is that the volume has increased. Over the years people have read about the Sweatshops which history has shown to have either been grossly exaggerated or, if real, are attended to by NIke over the years to the point of there being zero as we sit here today. But, for that entire period, underground sweatshop manufacturing of counterfeit apparel has existed in probably every country on Earth.
And it's dramatically so here in Australia. There's actually a huge population of migrant workers, of illegal immigrants, in the backstreet workshops operating twenty or thirty sewing machines at 4 o'clock in the morning.