NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — Four New York City residents have been arrested and charged with participating in a $130 million trafficking scheme that involved selling fake UGG boots, Air Jordan sneakers, Timberland boots and Beats headphones, among other items, prosecutors say.
Saiyin Hou, 25, of Brooklyn, and Hai Long Zhou, 53, Yan Xue Huang, 50, and Jian Fen Yang, 57, all of Queens, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to traffic, trafficking in counterfeit goods and money laundering on Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Thursday.
Between October 2019 and July 2021, the four New Yorkers were part of a scheme that imported generic goods into the tristate area from China, delivering them to workshops and storage facilities in Queens and on Long Island, according to prosecutors.
Workers at those facilities would fasten brand-name labels, emblems and other "signifiers" to the goods, before passing them off to buyers as authentic brand-name items, prosecutors said.
If the goods the traffickers sold had been real, they would have been worth more than $130 million in total, according to prosecutors.
"As alleged, the defendants trafficked in counterfeit merchandise that they fraudulently branded as genuine to pass off to purchasers in the United States at a purported retail value of more than $130 million," Jacquelyn Kasulis, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
"This office and its law enforcement partners are committed to protecting consumers from paying retail prices for phony merchandise and to holding defendants accountable for their greed," Kasulis added.
Attorney information for the four defendants wasn't immediately available Thursday.
