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You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

Before I was the host of Life Kit, I was a financial reporter for the public radio show marketplace.

And one time I went to Rhode Island to interview a woman who owned a small company that makes bird feeders.

A customer had bought a hummingbird feeder from her

brand on Amazon. Or so they thought, because it was a fake. A convincing one with her company's

name and phone number on it, but it didn't work. The pieces didn't fit together.

That kept happening to this company, and it happens to all sorts of companies, large and small.

That somewhere, someone decides to make a cheap fake version of their product and sell it online.

That's what you call a counterfeit. A counterfeit product is something that stems

from what's called a trademark counterfeit.

Basically, the seller is trying to make money off of some other company's reputation.

The unauthorized use of the trademark is what makes it a counterfeit because it signals to the marketplace

that that particular item is coming from the brand

when it indeed is not. That's Carrie Camel. She's the director of the Center for

Anti Counterfeiting and Product protection at Michigan State University.

Counterfeits are often a waste of money because they fall apart quickly or they don't work.

But maybe more importantly, they can be dangerous.

Fake electronics can malfunction or light on fire.

If you're buying a counterfeit version of something you're ingesting or putting on your skin,

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