According to the International Chamber of Commerce, the apparel and footwear industries loss $12 billion in revenue each year from counterfeiting.[1]

According to the World Customs Organization, in Europe, it is estimated that clothing and footwear companies lose EUR 7.5 billion per year to counterfeiting.[2]

Examples:

The FBI has strong evidence that the terrorists who were responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing used counterfeit textiles to finance their activities.   In 1996, the FBI discovered 100,000 counterfeit Nike "swoosh" and Olympic logo t-shirts that were intended to be sold at the 1996 summer Olympic games. The operation, which generated millions of dollars, was led by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman a blind cleric who was later convicted of plotting to bomb New York City Landmarks and sentenced to 240 years in prison.[3]

The former leader of the Vietnamese Born to Kill gang, serving life for murder, claimed to have made US$13 million from the sale of Rolex and Cartier watches in New Yorks Chinatown  in the late 1990s. [4]

As much as 20 per cent of the clothes bought in Italy are fakes, according to a report issued by the Italian consumers association Intesa dei Consumatori in April 2004. Fake shoes and clothes reached EUR 3.13 billion (US $3.705 billion) in terms of value in 2002, and accounted for nearly 21 per cent of all counterfeits produced and marketed in Italy in the same period. On May 12, 2004, the Italian customs police found 9,000 counterfeited Nike shoes (EUR800,000 worth), shipped in a container coming from China.[5]

Louis Vuitton, a unit of LVMH, the world's largest luxury-goods group, found 235,000 examples of counterfeit articles on 340 eBay pages in 2005. In one case, it tracked more than 100 copies of the same article being sold within one hour.[6]