Pandabuy positioned itself as an 'inverse buying agent' platform: a service that let overseas shoppers order from Chinese sellers and have goods consolidated and shipped abroad, promoted heavily through YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook influencers. In October 2023, a global footwear brand's Asia-Pacific IP team flagged counterfeit sports shoes moving through Chinese e-commerce channels tied to the platform, and filed a formal complaint with Shanghai's Changning police that November.
A six-month investigation found the operation spanned more than 20 cities — including Putian, Xiamen, Huizhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou and Harbin — running through a 100,000-square-metre warehouse network in Huizhou, roughly the size of 20 football pitches, and employing more than 2,200 people. Well-known sports shoe brands made up about 90% of the more than 200 brands' worth of inventory moving through it. Pandabuy's own 2023 revenue from the operation was estimated at close to 39.6 billion RMB (about $5.5 billion), moving over 50 million counterfeit items.
On 11 April 2024. Police seized more than 200,000 pairs of counterfeit branded sneakers, including fake Nike and Air Jordan shoes, plus millions of pre-packaged parcels ready for shipment abroad, and froze roughly 230 million RMB in assets belonging to the platform and its affiliates. At least 40 key suspects were subjected to criminal coercive measures the same day.
Pandabuy's warehouses reopened with limited operations afterward, and it later told customers that seized 'branded' items had been discarded. A subsequent data breach exposed 1.3 million customers' information, and in January 2025 a US court dissolved a $16 million asset freeze against the platform after ruling it operated as a logistics intermediary rather than a marketplace seller — leaving its overseas legal exposure narrower than the raid in China.
Built a $5.5B business on fake sneakers; a six-month probe ended in a 200-officer raid, seizing 200,000+ pairs and freezing 230M RMB.
Building a shopping-agent brand around shipping cheap goods with no meaningful screening made counterfeiting the platform's actual product, not an edge case.
Marketing the service directly to overseas consumers through influencers turned what looked like a logistics business into the visible, branded face of a global counterfeit supply chain.
Treating 'we are just a shipping intermediary' as a liability shield worked better in US civil court than against Chinese criminal law once the operation's scale was documented.
Concentrating manufacturing and warehousing in a handful of towns made the whole operation traceable back to one set of sites once investigators started pulling threads.
A shopping-agent platform that never screens what it ships is not a logistics business with a counterfeiting problem — counterfeiting is the business.
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