Confiscated items included fake watches, smartphones, cosmetics and more

Last week we told you how Dubai Municipality have plans to roll out an app that will help consumers detect if the goods they are buying are fake or not. While this a great step in weeding out fakes, rest assured that the responsibility of identifying counterfeit products doesn’t rest solely on your shoulders.

In fact, the government has been hard at work, it seems. Dubai Customs announced just yesterday that in the first half of 2017 alone, they have conducted upwards of 133 seizures of counterfeit goods worth a whopping Dhs72.6 million. That’s a lot of fake Gucci bags.

How have they managed to hit this dizzying number? Yousef Ozair Mubarak, Director of the Intellectual Property Rights Department at Dubai Customs says it’s through a combination of staff training and state-of-the-art inspection equipment: “We put the protection of intellectual property rights on top of our priorities at Dubai Customs, and are working to improve the level of our performance in dealing with counterfeit goods, by providing the best levels of training to the staff and inspectors in the circuit, so as to enable them to detect counterfeiting and piracy efficiently, backed by the best innovations and technologies in the control and inspection field,”

The fake goods seized included watches, perfumes, glasses, cosmetics, fabrics and electronics such as smartphones, computers and medical equipment.

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Mubarak further stressed the importance of safeguarding copyright law within the UAE, stating “Intellectual property rights protection gains importance in the evolution of our national economy in the current stage, particularly with the UAE focussing on unleashing the spirit of creativity and innovation in government work and in society at large.”

Dubai Customs worked closely with the Word Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and other relevant authorities to carry out the seizures.

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Images: Getty