Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about the dark side of counterfeit luxury goods.

My guest is Valerie Salambier.

Valerie has an impressive media and publishing background.

She has held leadership roles at the nation's top publications, including the New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, and Esquire.

Currently, she is American company executive mentor, but we're chatting today because of Valerie's role as the president and CEO of the Authentics Foundation.

Valerie, thanks so much for joining me.

My pleasure, Alexandra. I'm glad to be here.

So I know a lot of people who see buying knockoffs as entirely benign, even fun with a

slight freeze-on of risk. I very rarely speak to anyone, including lawyers and compliance professionals, who

are really horrified by the idea. So why should people care about this?

It's very interesting to me to hear you say that, because most people, unfortunately,

don't know that buying a counterfeit funds terrorism. It funds child labor and it funds drug cartels.

Those are three disturbing issues. And why don't you describe how that plays out?

If parents hear this and understood what funding child labor does to these kids, no one would ever buy a fake

anything ever again. Think about a girl, a young girl named When. Well, Wen lives in rural China.

When her parents both lost their jobs at a lumber mill, she had to go to work, again, 13 years old.

So she went 200 miles from her rural home into a bigger city, Guangzhou, and began working in a knockoff factory.

Two meals a day of rice, very unhealthy work conditions,

working 16 hours a day, tied to her machine,

her sewing machine, in which she was making fake leather bags,

working well beneath what China's minimum age is, and she had to send

...