Matthew Cox

they would probably hire a PI to do the first test purchase, at least just to, you know, figure out if it's counterfeit and also scope out the location, possibly do some legal owner information, figure out who we're going to be going after, because it could just be a booth in a swap meet.

So you really got to do a little bit of research to figure out who you're going after.

The cops aren't going to do that.

And then what will happen is they'll either

ask us to perform a civil raid or even kind of a raid light would be a cease and desist letter, which in New York city, they just flip you the finger, but in Los Angeles are a little bit more laid back and you can convince many of them to just give up their goods and avoid a lawsuit.

But if the client's lucky and it looks like a juicy enough target, they might be able to get law enforcement involved.

And back in the nineties, it was, it was the wild west.

So LAPD and LA Sheriff's Department had some time where they allocated police to the garment district, who did those busts with us.

But we will go in sometimes do citizens arrests, where we would take a cop along with us.

And you know, good thing for the cop, we would end up typing the report.

So kind of cut some corners on the cops end, but they still helped us on the heavy lifting.

Most of the time, not they'll either be interested or not.

And, you know, they'll, you know, they, they often have, uh, and is kind of a sidebar here.

That's very interesting because I'm part of a, um, a funded, um, uh, section of the department of justice where I work to consult on who gets certain grants in the IP and the counterfeiting world.

So for example, like when there, there aren't grants this year, but.

When there are grants for particular things like, you know, there's grants for AI now and all that other stuff.

But when there are IP grants for counterfeiting, what happens is police departments will apply for those grants.

Usually it's for like $400,000 for the year.

And when they get those grants, they have to allocate those hours, those man hours to going after counterfeits.

So if they apply for it, and it's overtime for a lot of these cops too.