The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that Amazon has a knockoff problem. The Globe's Danielle Groen writes that the marketplace is so cluttered with dupes that Amazon assembled a counterfeit crimes unit to sniff them out. In February, Amazon dethroned Walmart to become the world's largest company by sales. About 60 per cent of its merchandise sales now come from third party sellers, rather than from Amazon itself. Last year alone, the team of ex-prosecutors, former cops, investigators and data analysts seized upward of 15 million fake products around the globe, many of them shipped from China. That's more than twice as many knockoffs as they nabbed in 2023. There are some signs that a seller might be peddling dupes. Its name typically consists of five to nine letters -- mostly consonants, usually all-caps -- bearing little relation to the products it offers or even to any language. That's why a company called SUNHZMCKP is selling screwdrivers on Amazon. It's why MLKXCVB is one of the first results for cordless weed whackers and why EHEYCIGA comes up early and often in a search for orthopedic dog beds. Rapturous reviews are also a problem. Some studies have roughly found half of on-line reviews are fake.