Dangerous Chinese Goods Pouring into the United States

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Over the past several years, I have been ordering items through Amazon and they are shipped from their warehouses directly to my door. It is very convenient. But the most important thing is the choices. Whatever I want to buy, it is out there somewhere and all I have to do is locate it on Amazon and then buy it. Whatever strange thing I am looking for is out there.

Well something happened a few months ago, pre-pandemic. I ordered a product through Amazon, it was air-shipped from China and showed up at my door in a couple weeks. It is astonishing the age we live in.

Well there is a downside to this marvel. The pandemic took hold and more and more people relied on Amazon and other internet companies for their goods. Society in the U.S. moved to online shopping big time. And many of the purchases are air-shipped directly from China. This merchandise never went thru the Amazon warehouse, it went direct.

I came across an article a couple days ago that highlights a major problem with buying Chinese goods directly from China. It is actually many problems wrapped up in lack of quality control and oversight wrapped up with criminality. The U.S. government tasked a special taskforce called Operation Mega Flex to deal with this problem.
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This “flood” is indeed a flood. Every single day, about 700,000 small Made-in-China parcels pour into America. About 68% of these parcels are handled by the United States Postal Service at ports of entry like New York’s JFK Airport, Chicago’s O’Hare, and LAX in California. The remainder of air parcels come into cities like Memphis, Cincinnati, and Louisville in facilities managed by private carriers like DHL, FedEx, and UPS.

If the data collected thus far from Operation Mega Flex accurately captures the scope of the Made-in-China contraband problem – and the data has been remarkably consistent over the 14 monthly blitz operations to date – here’s what it means: On a daily basis, nearly 90,000 Americans are being assaulted in one form or another through small parcel mail by unscrupulous Made-in-China exporters.

Just exactly what forms do these Chinese assaults take? As CBP has looked under the Made-in-China hood in the course of inspecting over 71,000 parcels, it has found four different categories of “discrepancies.”

1. For starters, about a third of the Made-in-China contraband is counterfeited. The Chinese knockoffs uncovered by CBP have included everything from Louis Vuitton bags, Ferragamo belts, Rolex watches, and Apple earbuds to fraudulent China Virus test kits and fake prescription drugs like Lipitor and Viagra. That’s not just a consumer rip off – fake medicines can outright kill you while defective electronics products can burn your house down.

2. A second major category uncovered by Operation Mega Flex is even more deadly. It consists of assorted drug paraphernalia along with deadly narcotics such as fentanyl, methamphetamine, and oxycodone. In just one package seized this past March at the JFK facility, over 5,000 grams of the dangerously addictive opioid, hydrocodone, were uncovered—that’s more than 55,000 doses.

3. Then, of course, there are the various fake documents like driver’s licenses, passports, and police badges–the latest blitz operation last month seized several Department of Justice Special Agent badges that were remarkably realistic. And if you need a gun or a silencer or an automatic weapons converter, you can get that from Communist China too, courtesy of e-commerce platforms.

4. Finally, there are all manner of agricultural products that illegally enter the United States that have the potential to wreak great havoc with our food supply chains or our personal health. For example, when a deadly African swine fever wiped out over a million pigs, America’s own pork supply was threatened by shipments of potentially infected Chinese pork – the virus can live in raw meat for weeks and frozen meat for months.

More recently, we have seen an influx of unsolicited packages originating from China containing mislabeled seeds. As another example, in June of 2020, CBP specialists intercepted a Made-in-China package containing thirteen unsealed bags filled with vials of blood, plasma, and human urine, all believed to be infected with STDs and STIs such as gonorrhea, chlamydia, and hepatitis.

Source: Dangerous Chinese counterfeit goods are pouring into America, here's how we stop it

I always avoid any auctions on ebay when the item is listed in China or Singapore. I have heard how they will sell fake or knock off items. Only time I buy from them is if it's a stuffie and I don't care for brand names and labels, to me it is just a stuffie. It doesn't matter. I just won't buy any electronics from them.

Also, things have always been made in China. I would look at toys and they would say "Made in China" even if the company was Mattel. Even Barbie dolls are made in China. That is because the company pays people there at a much cheaper price to make them.

But counterfeit items are a problem because they are made with cheaper material and they copy company logo names and this hurts real companies.


And why is this posted in the PPR? I don't think this is something political.

I don't know. Maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

They're getting into the UK as well. I seriously wonder how many house fires are caused by this stuff which has never passed electrical safety tests.

I avoid buying far Eastern goods where possible because they are horrible quality most of the time especially the engineering stuff.

Uniden makes good stuff in the Philippines; but I certainly would not buy their stuff if it was made in the PRC.

In the battle of quality in engineering tooling China is joint last with India. Even the cheap stuff we used to make in the UK is better than theirs is!

Believe me I've seen some truly awful stuff like rotary tables that don't go all the way around from India and toolholders that don't fit and jump out in use from China. Oh, and chucks sent with the jaws not fitted...because they didn't fit!