A small Ohio-based business that sells stainless steel-wrapped smartphone charging cords on Amazon.com is suing the online retailer, alleging in a lawsuit that counterfeit products on the e-commerce site have damaged his company’s reputation.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Jon Fawcell, owner of Fuse Chicken, began ordering his own products on Amazon.com after his once-raving customer reviews began to plummet into a deluge of one-star pans.
Fawcett was dumbfounded. Then he found a clue in one of the reviews: a picture of a charger emblazoned with a Fuse Chicken logo that wasn’t quite right. Over the following months, Fawcett placed numerous Amazon orders and found would become the basis of a lawsuit he filed last year against Amazon.
Mixed in with Amazon’s inventory of authentic merchandise were crude copycats. Some looked like the real thing, but didn’t include Fuse Chicken’s name. Others bore the name, but weren’t made by his company, Fawcett tells the newspaper.
His experiment suggests there is no way for even the savviest Amazon shopper to avoid the threat of counterfeits. The goods may look real online, but there is no guarantee of authenticity.
Amazon, in court filings, denied mixing knockoff Fuse Chicken products with genuine ones.
