Of the measures golf equipment manufacturers have taken to crack down on the booming counterfeiting business, none is more dramatic than the raids they spring on unsuspecting shops and factories in China. GOLF MAGAZINE joined a recent ambush for a never-before-seen look at a seedy and sprawling industry.
On a smoggy winter morning in Dongguan, China, an industrial boomtown two hours north of Hong Kong, a black sedan with tinted windows slowed to a crawl along a gritty commercial drag. It was a street like many others in the low-slung urban center, its sidewalks crowded, its storefronts cramped and fluorescent-lit. But its proximity to a leafy country club lent its retail operations a distinctive slant. Arrayed along the strip, within blocks of one another, stood more than a dozen golf equipment shops, all advertising the latest models by the leading brands—clubs, hats, shoes, gloves, balls, you name it—at bargain-basement prices that seemed too good to be true because they were.
The sedan kept rolling, past the Lotus Golf Centre and the Green Grass Golf Shop, a tiny corner store with a Titleist banner stretched proudly on display. A few doors down, near the Qun Xin Golf Shop, the sedan stopped and its driver, Jason Yao, checked his cellphone.
"These guys don't know it, but we've been watching them," he said. "That's okay. They'll find out soon."
As if on cue, a fleet of blue and white vans sped around the corner and pulled up to the curb. The van doors swung open and out rushed a squadron of uniformed officials. Yao killed his ignition and followed close behind.
Several alert shop-owners, seeing what was coming, switched off their lights and pulled down the metal curtains that hung above their doorways. But most were caught red-handed.
"They're not fakes! They're not fakes!" a flush-faced merchant cried in Mandarin, as Yao and the officials began emptying his shelves, carting off armloads of fairway woods and irons.
Yao ignored him.
"I don't feel bad for guys like that," Yao murmured, when the man was out of earshot, his shop stripped bare. "They act like they're innocent, but they're not."
In the bluntness of his speech and the firmness of his manner, Yao, who is 37, betrays a bureaucrat's insistence on by-the-books procedure and a sheriff's zero-tolerance for scofflaws. Both are handy traits, given his job. As a point man for the Acushnet Company in its escalating battle against golf equipment counterfeiting, Yao is an enforcer on a wild frontier, deputized to crack down on a crime that costs U.S. manufacturers an estimated $6.5 billion a year.
Every month, teamed with Chinese government inspectors and local police, Yao takes part in raids of retail shops and factories around mainland China, nipping at a problem with complex roots and global reach. Their target is a shadowy network of counterfeiters and their middlemen, who, abetted by the Internet, operate pipelines that run from China through wide swaths of the golf world. Authentic in appearance, if not performance, the fake goods they produce—outgrowths of increasingly sophisticated reverse-engineering—crisscross the continents at the speed of broadband. Though the bogus equipment rarely makes it into golf shops in the United States, it still floods across the border and into golfers' hands. It is not uncommon for ersatz versions of the latest Cleveland wedges, say, or the newest Callaway irons, to turn up on eBay or other online auction sites weeks before the real things land on U.S. shelves.
Unwittingly, American consumers purchase tens of millions of dollars worth of golf counterfeits a year. Faced with this assault, the major golf equipment-makers have joined forces to combat it—training federal customs agents to sniff out fakes, hiring private eyes and lobbyists to work the trenches overseas. Their efforts have yielded some headline results.
This past fall, authorities in England arrested the ringleader of an online operation suspected of trafficking in millions of pounds worth of fake golf products. Less than a week later, in a separate case, another English online seller of counterfeit Titleist equipment was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for his role in the crime. Even in China, where golf counterfeiters are often met with no more than a hand-slap and a fine, convictions have been levied. Last November, in a case watched closely by the industry, two men charged with manufacturing, distributing and selling fake equipment received three-and four-year prison terms, respectively—China's first prison sentences for golf counterfeiting crimes.
"We've made some progress," Yao said. "But we'll never be able to stop the problem. We can only hope to control it."
A Chinese-born and U.S. trained attorney, Yao spent eight years fighting counterfeiting in the cosmetics industry, until 2004, when he signed on as Acushnet's chief legal counsel in China. His is a rare golf-related job that carries physical risk. In remote regions of the mainland, where entire local economies often depend on jobs provided by counterfeiting factories, employees don't take very kindly to outside intervention. They circle the wagons, and often respond with force. Undercover agents, dispatched to the hinterlands to infiltrate illegal operations, have been beaten, stabbed and even murdered. Yao himself has received death threats. He uses aliases. On surveillance runs at markets known for selling fakes, he carries a video camera in his breast pocket, disguised as a ballpoint pen.
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