Counterfeiters have gone from handbags to board games, and they’re getting faster
Everything was going right for Wonderbow co-founder Laia Gonzalez. Her small publishing company’s latest project, a board game called Kelp, had wildly exceeded expectations and was closing in on its final crowdfunding total of more than $1.5 million. Delivery was scheduled for October 2024, so there was plenty of time to begin finalizing the game’s components and coordinating with a manufacturer for production. Hoping for a little extra dose of dopamine, Gonzalez did a quick Google search to see if anyone in the vast and turbulent sea of tabletop influencers was particularly hyped about her company’s game. But instead of a new video of someone sitting in front of an overstuffed Ikea shelving unit, she was surprised to find Kelp already up for sale on Amazon. She, Wonderbow, and game designer Carl Robinson had become the latest victims of board game counterfeiters.
“We had 12 listings [on Amazon] by then,” Gonzalez told Polygon in a recent interview. “One of those had 400-plus sales.”
She sprang into action, alerting Amazon of the fraud. After days of back-and-forth, the dozen or so illegal listings that she’d found were finally taken down. Thirty-six more showed up overnight. The counterfeiters also expanded their efforts to Google Shopping and other online marketplaces, with more listings always seeming to pop up even as Gonzalez reported them. It was like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Soon she was sending off a series of emails politely asking a startup eBay competitor run out of a Florida office park to delist a product that was clearly someone infringing on her company’s copyright.
That’s when the customer service complaints began to roll in.
“They literally sent us an email saying, ‘We received the game. It looks great, but the manual is missing,’” Gonzalez recalled. “‘Also, there is a Lego shark in it. Could you please send us a real mini?’”
Over the last few decades, as brick-and-mortar retail has struggled and online shopping has become the norm, an entire
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