CNBC Special Report: How Walmart Marketplace’s Rapid Growth Came With Fakes And Scams 9/19/25
Squawk Pod
CNBC
4.2 • 543 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Just down the street from Chicago's iconic Wrigley Field is Demos Pizza, known for serving |
| 0:07.4 | up slices to hungry baseball fans. |
| 0:10.5 | Its menu has classics like pepperoni pies to creative combos like chicken and waffles. |
| 0:16.6 | What's not on the menu? |
| 0:18.1 | Luxury beauty products. |
| 0:20.2 | But here's Demos pizza selling Lancombe face cream on Walmart's |
| 0:23.9 | online marketplace for just $25.99. A 91% discount from its typical retail price of $280. Just to be clear, |
| 0:36.4 | you don't have a side hustle selling beauty products on Walmart.com, right? |
| 0:39.3 | I do not, no. We, yeah, we just make pizza here. |
| 0:42.3 | And so if someone comes in and asks for double pepperoni, that's not like a code word for a knockoff beauty product. |
| 0:47.3 | No. |
| 0:48.3 | Dmitri Sirkin Nikolao, the restaurant's owner, was startled when we told him there was a third-party seller on Walmart.com |
| 0:55.4 | using his business credentials to sell Lancombe beauty cream. |
| 0:59.4 | And to make matters worse, lab testing confirmed the cream was counterfeit. |
| 1:05.0 | Consumer buying high-end beauty products from Demos Pizza, I mean, does that make sense to you? |
| 1:09.6 | No, it seems ludicrous. |
| 1:11.7 | We spent 16 plus years building the reputation here in Chicago and to know that somebody could |
| 1:16.2 | just take our name and sell whatever they would like on Walmart's website where we have no |
| 1:22.4 | control doesn't feel good. And Demos isn't alone. During our investigation into Walmart's marketplace, |
| 1:28.8 | we identified at least 43 instances, including Demos, where a business's name and address |
| 1:37.1 | were stolen to create a third-party seller account, from a New York grocery chain to publicly |
| 1:42.8 | traded companies. |
... |
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