Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
Insider Reveals How Counterfeit Markets Actually Work | $500B/YR
05 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What motivates a private investigator to focus on counterfeit markets?
I'm a private investigator. I've stopped millions of dollars of counterfeit watches entering the U.S. market. There are two types of counterfeits. There are deceptive and non-deceptive.
Chapter 2: What types of counterfeits exist and why are they dangerous?
Purses, handbags, watches, and jerseys. Those are the four massive markets out there that everybody knows it's fake, but the deceptive is really where it becomes dangerous, and that's what people don't really know about. I'm working cases where there are eye drops, food supplements, stuff that goes in your body that is fake. And that market is massive.
Chapter 3: How did the guest's background influence his career in investigations?
Yeah. So I was, I was born and raised in a summer's point, New Jersey, right outside of Atlantic city. Um, if you ever watch a show boardwalk empire and you see most of the time it's on an Island called Atlantic city, obviously. Um, sometimes you'll see them, uh, in the woods with, you know, whatever, pulling off crimes, bootlegging and things like that. Well, I come from the woods and, um,
My father was a New Jersey state trooper. And while going through a divorce in 1981, my mother committed suicide. And yeah, that kind of threw us all for a loop. So my father ended up quitting the state police and starting a private investigative firm. And that was when I first started seeing my father work for the private sector.
Chapter 4: What are the typical methods used to track counterfeit operations?
And of course, because of my mother's suicide, you had four people in one house with PTSD that didn't know how to handle it. So it was, you know, it was very rough 1980s teen years for me. But, you know, we made it through. My dad started doing the regular kind of stuff that people you would expect would be doing in Atlantic City as sort of a mob city, casino town.
And this was the high time for the casinos in Atlantic City. The first casino license wasn't issued in Atlantic City until I want to say around 75, 76. So the casinos were just being built. And my father provided security for the Playboy Casino that eventually was one of the first casinos in Atlantic City to be built.
And he was working for the casinos, staffing the security and also doing some anti-fraud, anti-corruption cases and things like that. And then one day in the early 80s, he got a call from a PI who was in New York City, big time PI doing work for Rolex and all the other brands.
Chapter 5: How do private investigators collaborate with law enforcement?
And then they asked him to start doing undercover buys and cease and desist letters and raids down on the Jersey Shore and eventually Pennsylvania and all that. And I grew up with him doing that. And I never really wanted to be a part of the family business. I actually wanted to be a stand-up comic. I decided after high school to go into youth ministries and I went to Bible college.
After three semesters of that, I realized love Jesus, hate the rules. I'm going to go to LA and become a standup comic.
So what makes you think you could, you could like being a standup comic is hard.
Oh man. I know.
Chapter 6: What challenges do brands face in combating counterfeit products?
That's why I'm not one now. So yeah, Yeah, so I went out there and I had a cousin that went out there, cousins a year younger than me, went out there to be a drummer. So I followed a year later. And when I did, I worked for a movie survey company and a video store. And then I met a girl, married her, still married to this day.
But she said, you should probably find a job where you can start helping pay the bills. So I asked my dad, I said, do you know anybody out in Los Angeles who does what you do? you know, hunting people, selling fakes out in LA. So he hooked me up with a job and I start working for a place called National Trademark Investigations in Los Angeles.
And that was when I started actually my professional foray into counterfeiting. Okay. So I have a question real quick.
Yeah. These corporations, wherever these manufacturers, these people, you know, whatever Rolex or Nike or whoever it is, they contact you guys and have you, they launched like an investigation. Why can't they just go to the local police and say, Hey, we know there's four or five people selling fake, you know, Adidas products. Can you guys look into it?
Or they just like, they just don't, it's not a priority. You basically have to hand them the whole case for them to take interest or what is it?
Yeah, that's a good question and good insight too, because that is what happens.
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Chapter 7: What are some notable cases in the counterfeit investigation field?
And in some cases, the brands don't always, they prefer to go straight to the police because then there's no money out of their pocket hiring us first. A lot of times what happens is whether they get the lead
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.
Chapter 8: How has the counterfeit market evolved with technology?
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.
like, how does that progress? Like, let's say, I understand you're saying you're due a raid, but I mean, do you guys have to, in order to get the police involved, do you have to type up an entire report before, you know, you make a buy, you go to them. And what if they're like, eh, you know, you bought two pair of, you know, two pair of Adidas. Like, I mean, okay, they're fake.
I mean, what do you want us to do? We got murders. We got this, you know, what, what, how do you coax them into saying, look, this is a big deal.
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. So that's a lot of times, especially nowadays, because you said there are murders and everything. So unless there's funding specifically for enforcing counterfeits, you aren't gonna see that much police presence.
So now to go into the raids, The way raids work, and a raid obviously is by force. I talked about cease and desist letters, which is basically, you know, hey, why don't you give this stuff up? It's better for both of us. You know, you can, you know, avoid potential lawsuit if you give it up. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
But to perform a civil seizure, which is the civil version of a criminal raid, would be, we would have to hire the U.S. Marshals. in order to do that. So you would hire the marshals and also put up a rather sizable bond for the for the raid. So and you have to have I mean, you could also hire the sheriff's department in many cases, but but in a lot of because it's overtime work for them. Right.
But a lot of times it's the marshals just because there's federal jurisdiction if anything goes to haywire. Sometimes we've seen, you know, terrorism, you know, and stuff like that links in those things, which the Sheriff's Department, you know, helps out with too.
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