Fake perfumes from China are flooding Europe, sending girls to intensive care after smelling them

On a sunny day in July, Adrian Mogos, a reporter for the Black Sea website, was sipping a beer on the balcony of a restaurant on the Black Sea coast when she was approached by a graying man wearing a white T-shirt and carrying a small bag.

"Need Chanel No. 5?" "The man asked. "Let me see what you got." "Said Mogos.

The man selling perfume looked warily at the police in the street and fumbled in his little white bag. "Chanel No. 5 is gone, but there are Dior and Pagot, 25 euros a bottle."

At present, Europeans are consuming large amounts of fake perfume without warning about the health risks. The market is generating huge profits for criminals, who face far less criminal penalties than the drug and sex trade.

"Certier" and "Chonel" perfumes

To the rhythmic sound of sirens, strong sea breezes, the hum of engines and the roar of loading machinery, a 20-ton container is unloaded onto a truck. Officers in blue uniforms, emblazoned with "Customs" ICONS, are taking photos of the containers, checking the corresponding documents and checking the contents through security barcodes.

At the port of Agigea in southern Constanta, Romania, transport vehicles take the containers from the free trade zone to a customs brokerage, where they fill out the paperwork needed to import their contents into Romania.

Next, the container will undergo a secondary inspection, and in addition to the special customs joint team and border police, there will be a special unit to catch criminals in the side to assist.

If they find anything suspicious, customs and border police will open the container and examine each item one by one, a process that can take up to a day. If counterfeit products are found, those involved face criminal prosecution. Goods from Southeast Asia, China, Thailand and the Middle East have been targeted for inspection.

Products exported from China pass through Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, and Eastern Europe has become an important place for customs to crack down on counterfeit cosmetics.

In 2008, the Romanian border police seized more counterfeit perfumes than ever before - 433,000, 1,000 percent more than in 2007. According to Agigea Customs data, the number of cases of counterfeit perfume is increasing year by year, with the largest amount involved in December 2012, worth 1.4 million euros.

Most of the bad perfumers are fake brands on the market such as Versace, Chanel, Prada, Gucci, Bvlggari, Boss, Thierry Muglier, Dior, Nina Ricci and Givenchy.

Eduard Gheorghe, a customs officer at the port of Agigea, said: "These fake perfumes usually come in two forms, one with the logo of the big name and one that changes one letter of the original brand."

In warehouses stacked with fake goods, perfumes printed with "Certier" and "Chonel" can be seen everywhere, instead of Cartier and Chanel.

When the real first-line brand enters the customs, the brand chamber of commerce will arrange a special person to contact the customs and provide detailed information on the container items.

Dealers pick up the goods from the port, pass them on to distributors, and small traders pick them up from distributors.

Brands' lazy 'to crack down on fakes

Although thousands of bottles of counterfeit perfume are passed through the port every day, only a small number are inspected by customs and border police.

On August 31, 2012, a joint customs team and overseas guards seized nearly 2,000 bottles of counterfeit perfume in containers. All the packaging was printed with a top brand, and the importer was a 28-day-old Romanian company registered in the category of retail household goods.

The company, whose registered headquarters are ina small village outside Bucharest, is run by Galina Zubcao, who was born in 1957 in Moldova and has Romanian citizenship.

Zubsa said she bought the products online from a Chinese company, but insisted they were not branded. After being tipped off by an anonymous source, her entire shipment has been seized.

However, she said that the prosecutor's office will not launch a criminal investigation because the actions did not bring financial losses to the brand companies.

When counterfeit products are found, customs and Border police ask companies such as Chanel to take action. Usually, the police destroy the products, but if the brands do not feel their intellectual property rights have been infringed, the fake fragrances are returned to the importers.

"These manufacturers either didn't respond to our requests, or they said the number of cases was too small and they were affected by the financial crisis, and they didn't want to pay the high cost of testing these counterfeit products." "Said Gabriel Calimente, director general of intellectual property at the Romanian Coast Guard.

Teenagers are a big victim

Teenagers are the big victims of fake perfume, love beauty but limited financial resources, they can only consume cheap perfume.

In 2011, three Romanian girls aged between 12 and 13 were admitted to intensive care after wearing a lilac perfume allegedly sourced from China.

In addition, the probability of dizziness, vomiting and other symptoms caused by bad perfume is about 1 percent per year.

"Fake products contain many toxins." "These products pose a huge health risk," said Aurel Dobre, an inspector at the Romanian police Directorate's laboratory. "For example, a genuine perfume costs 57 euros and a counterfeit one costs 11 euros." Most counterfeit perfumes are sold on the street through professional organizations, many people switch from drug trafficking to selling perfumes, considerable profits, far less than the penalty of drug trafficking, so that traders more happy, and consumers do not all think that selling fakes is also a crime.

Moges writes that Mademoiselle Chanel once said that a woman who does not wear perfume has no future. This sentence has been advertised for the perfume industry for nearly a hundred years, leading countless beauty lovers to enter the ranks of "smell and recognize people", but as The Times change, perhaps it should be added: health is a woman's greater future.