Did you know? Abercrombie & Fitch brands, including Ruehl and Hollister, are among the top 10 counterfeited labels in the world. Here’s proof.

It wasn’t on the gritty streets of New York. It wasn’t in some dingy shop in China. Instead, the scene for the latest bust of counterfeit luxury goods was in the bucolic campus of the University of Western Ontario.

There, a vendor of counterfeit Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister merchandise was booted off campus recently after Mario Iafrate, a private investigator for Hallmark Investigations who was hired by the companies, presented the vendor with a cease and desist letter.

According to Mr. Iafrate, all the garments he saw on display were counterfeit. And he knows this because while Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister label every style, color and size with different serial and bar code numbers, each piece of clothing in the UCC had the same numbers.

No charges were filed but the vendor removed his products from the University Community Centre and vacated the premises.

According to David Simmonds, VP-university affairs for the University Students’ Council (USC), this was not the first time the counterfeiter had visited Western and that “he has a good record with us.”

However, Loren Lipkus, a partner at Kestenberg, Siegal, Lipkus LLP, who represents Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister, claimed that Western has a history of problems with bootleggers. “We’ve had reports on several occasions over the past few years regarding counterfeit products being sold at the University of Western Ontario,” Lipkus said.

Iafrate agreed, “We loaded up a truck [at Western] last year.”

Unfortunately, Western is not alone as counterfeiters have been conducting brisk sales at universities across Canada. Iafrate said, “[Consumers] haven’t been educated and informed about the impact of the counterfeiting problem.” He added that the lax counterfeit laws in Canada and the lack of law enforcement resources are also to blame for this phenomenon.

Even worse, students seem to support such an enterprise and don’t seem to be sensitive to the fact that they’re funding illegal activity.

As for the university, the USC is waiting to see what comes of the allegations.