Republic Brands Files Five Lawsuits and Police Seizures in Counterfeit Crackdown

Republic Brands has announced a major enforcement push against counterfeit nicotine products, pairing a series of civil lawsuits with police action to seize the fake stock, in a combined civil and criminal effort that is one of the larger coordinated countermeasures the company has described.

The civil arm of the action is five lawsuits, filed across New York and New Jersey, against companies and sellers the company says are dealing in counterfeit products that carry its brands. The suits are aimed at the supply side of the counterfeits, and at the sellers through whom the fake products are reaching the market, and they add up to the kind of multi-front civil case a company brings when it has identified a number of actors in a chain of distribution.

The criminal arm is the cooperation with state police, which resulted in a seizure of thousands of counterfeit product units, and in criminal charges being brought against the operator of a distributor that was moving the stock. The combination of civil suits against the sellers and the criminal case against a distributor is meant to reach both the commercial and the supply side of the counterfeit trade at once.

The company framed the effort as protecting consumers, pointing to the risks of counterfeit products that have not been through the checks that regulated product must pass, and to the broader problem of counterfeits taking share from the legitimate trade. The seizure and the five suits together mark a step up in how the company is going after the counterfeit channel, using both the courts and the police rather than one or the other.

The result is a coordinated push that touches the two places where a counterfeit chain is vulnerable, the people who sell it and the people who supply it, and it is an approach the company is now putting in public as part of its statement on where it stands with the problem.