Wenzhou court exposes Labubu fake clues, convictions and suspended terms

The fake Labubu blind boxes in Wenzhou gave themselves away in the details: oversized eyes, a rougher sculpt and a missing Pop Mart logo on the metal ring. On May 15, the Ouhai District People’s Court finished hearing a criminal counterfeit case and convicted two defendants for selling goods under a fake registered trademark.

The buyer in the case had ordered 300 big boxes of Labubu blind boxes in September 2025 through a trading-company channel after being told the goods were genuine and could be verified by scanning two codes. The shipment that arrived did not match that promise. Instead, the buyer received 300 boxes from Guangdong Province and 1,500 from Jinhua, and after opening them, found the figures looked poorly made and reported the matter to police. That mismatch between the sales pitch and the physical product is the first warning sign in this case: code-scanning claims mean little if the packaging, source and sculpt do not line up.

The court records also show how the counterfeit supply chain moved. Ye sold 5,243 counterfeit Labubu plush toys from July to November 2025, generating 80,948.41 yuan in sales. Zuo bought 1,500 pieces from Ye for 14,000 yuan and another 300 from other channels for 13,860 yuan, then sold all 1,800 counterfeit items for 50,558.97 yuan. Both men received suspended prison terms and fines, a reminder that trendy-toy counterfeiting is being treated as a criminal trademark offense, not a harmless resale dispute.

For collectors, the red flags in this case are concrete. Look closely at the eyes, the finish on the sculpt, and the metal ring, especially if the ring lacks a Pop Mart logo. Treat promises that a toy is “genuine” and “scan-verifiable” as useless unless the item itself passes inspection and the seller can show a clean, traceable supply chain. The riskiest channels are the ones that lean on vague trading-company sourcing, mixed shipping origins and proof that depends only on a code.

The Wenzhou case lands inside a wider crackdown. Chinese customs has described Labubu as a leading trendy-toy IP with a large fanbase in China and abroad, and reported that Labubu 3.0 launched in physical stores in April 2025, triggering long queues worldwide. Ningbo Customs detained nearly 200,000 suspected infringing Labubu goods on April 23, 2025, and Beilun Customs in Ningbo later found 2,350 blind boxes, 4,410 plush toys, 9,400 keychains, 495 raincoats and 1,200 combs suspected of infringing Labubu rights. China Customs later said more than 40,000 suspected counterfeit Labubu-related products had been seized nationwide.

That is the trust shift collectors need to read clearly: if the eyes are too big, the sculpt is too rough, or the logo ring is wrong, the box has already failed the test.