Instagram has become a hotbed for promoting counterfeit designer goods, The Fashion Law reports. More and more accounts are using fake-specific hashtags to help users identify and purchase convincing and affordable knock-off products.
The findings arrive via Ghost Data and show that hashtags attached to fake Louis Vuitton, Supreme, Chanel, Nike, and Gucci goods are becoming increasingly problematic. #MirrorQuality, for example, is attached to one million posts, while 2.2 million posts are tagged with #Replica.
“Instagram and counterfeiting in 2019: new features, old problems,” the report states, adding that the severity of the problem is growing. In this year alone, over 50,000 accounts have uploaded over 65 million posts and 1.6 million stories every month, all of which are dedicated to selling fakes. What’s more, the number of accounts themselves has grown 160 percent since 2016.
Ghost Data CEO Andrea Stroppa told NBC News, “The luxury brands I speak to are frustrated because it’s so easy to find these accounts, but Instagram is not very responsive.”
