HARRISBURG – There will no doubt be some unhappy quarantined gamers after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized a shipment of counterfeit PlayStation PS4 wireless controllers Monday.
The shipment of 55 DualShock 4 wireless controllers arrived from Hong Kong on May 11. CBP officers suspected the shipment to be counterfeit after noticing that all of the controllers had the same serial number. CBP officers then seized the controllers after the trademark holder confirmed that the controllers were counterfeit.
If authentic, the DualShock 4 controllers would have had a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of more than $3,000. They were destined to an address in Lancaster County, Pa.
Counterfeit gaming controllers are usually constructed of inferior parts, such as circuit boards, processors, joysticks and buttons, speakers and plastic bodies, and tend to break quickly and easily.
“Counterfeit and pirated goods threatens the competitiveness of American businesses, and may potentially harm American consumers,” said Michelle Stover, CBP’s Port Director for the Port of Harrisburg. “Enforcing intellectual property rights remains an international trade priority for Customs and Border Protection, and we will continue to seize counterfeit products when we encounter them at our ports of entry.”
Harrisburg CBP officers have been busy with counterfeit consumer goods recently. Last Wednesday, officers seized more than 86,000 counterfeit Pokémon action figures and more than 1,200 counterfeit Linhua Qingwen tablets, an unapproved medicine whose alleged effectiveness at treating COVID-19 is unknown.
CBP protects businesses and consumers every day through an aggressive Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) enforcement program. Importation of counterfeit merchandise can cause significant revenue loss, damage the U.S. economy, and threaten the health and safety of the American people.
On a typical day in 2019, CBP officers seized $4.3 million worth of products with Intellectual Property Rights violations. Learn more about what CBP did during "A Typical Day" in 2019.
game controllers imported for resale.
CBP officers and Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) agents seized 27,599 shipments containing counterfeit goods in Fiscal Year (FY) 2019. The decrease from 33,810 seizures in FY 2018 can be attributed to the challenges at the Southern border and the one-month government shutdown. However, the total estimated manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of the seized goods, had they been genuine, increased to over $1.5 billion from nearly $1.4 billion in FY 2018.
E- Commerce sales have contributed to large volumes of low-value packages imported into the United States. In FY 2019, there were 144 million express shipments and 463 million international mail shipments. Over 90 percent of all intellectual property seizures occur in the international mail and express environments
The People’s Republic of China (mainland China and Hong Kong) remained the primary source economy for seized counterfeit and pirated goods, accounting for 83 percent of all IPR seizures and 92 percent of the estimated MSRP value of all IPR seizures.
Read CBP’s Intellectual Property Seizure Report for Fiscal Year 2019 for more IPR stats and analysis.
CBP's border security mission is led at ports of entry by CBP officers from the Office of Field Operations. Please visit CBP Ports of Entry to learn more about how CBP’s Office of Field Operations secures our nation’s borders.