BMW and Amazon win lawsuit over fake BMW-branded items at EU court
German carmaker BMW has successfully brought a civil case alongside e-commerce giant Amazon to block the sale of counterfeit BMW parts and accessories at the European Union's Trademark Court in the Spanish city of Alicante.
The court ruled that four Spanish residents had attempted to sell counterfeit BMW parts and accessories on the online platform throughout Europe, the two companies announced in a joint statement on Thursday.
The court ordered the fraudsters to destroy the counterfeit products and pay compensation to the plaintiffs.
It is the first success of its kind in court in Spain that Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) and the BMW Group have achieved.
The four men were ruled in the civil case to have violated laws, breached Amazon's guidelines and disregarded the BMW Group's registered trademarks by attempting to sell counterfeit products such as valve caps, emblems and key rings.
The men had even submitted fake proofs of origin as part of the scheme, the court found.
Amazon said that it detected the suspicious activity using advanced machine learning technology and worked with BMW to confirm that the products in question were in fact counterfeit.
