Chanel Inc. has filed a sweeping cyberpiracy and trademark infringement lawsuit in Las Vegas against 399 websites it accuses of selling counterfeit items bearing the luxury retailer’s trademark.
The civil lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Nevada seeks unspecified damages from unnamed operators of websites that the New York-based company says operate from China, the Bahamas and other overseas jurisdictions with lax trademark enforcement systems.
Chanel, based in New York, said the counterfeit goods sold include handbags, wallets, shoes, boots, sunglasses, scarves, tee shirts, watches and jewelry.
The suit says that, like Chanel, the defendant websites use search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, including placing content on the Internet that’s likely to show up in keyword searches on sites like Google and Yahoo.
The websites include domain names such as cheaptiffanystore.com and wholesale-cheapjewelry.com and other Chanel-sounding or Tiffany-sounding names.
Besides those lawsuits, one of the Chanel and Tiffany attorneys sued 182 website operators May 10 in the same Las Vegas court, alleging infringements of Louis Vuitton trademarks and the counterfeiting of luxury goods.
“The recent explosion of counterfeiting over the Internet has created an environment which requires Tiffany to file a massive number of lawsuits, often it turns out, against the same individuals and groups, in order to protect both consumers and itself from the ill effects of confusion and the erosion of the goodwill connected to the Tiffany brand,” the lawsuit says.
The websites are also part of a huge referer spam operation allegedly headquartered in The Bahamas. Referer spam is a technique that cybercriminals use that involves making thousands of repeated web site requests using nuisance urls that point to the site the spammer wishes to advertise.
It is suspected that a former resident of the Bahamnas, who owns a hosting company that operates from The Bahamas, is involved with the spam operation. The same man is also a cybersquatter, a person who registers domain names that are very similar to legitimate domain names in an effort to capitalize on mis-spellings and create confusion in the marketplace. Several local Bahamian companies have been victims of these criminal activities.
