BUYER BEWARE: Lots more than just Phony Rolexes and Gucci Bags Thrive on the Web

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Aside from their low price, the weight-loss pills that a Texas emergency room doctor ordered online looked like the real thing until he took them and nearly died. 

The blue capsules were supposed to be an over-the-counter drug but were loaded with sibutramine, a prescription drug the Food and Drug Administration had warned was linked to heart attacks and strokes and subsequently pulled off the market.

FDA investigators say a Chinese national named Shengyang Zhou sold them through a middleman in the United States, where small-time retailers resold them on eBay. At least five other people were injured by the pills, according to court documents. 

Fake pills like those are part of a large, and growing, global trade in counterfeit products that are bought and sold online — some of them hazardous or even deadly. The anonymity of the Internet — including what's known as the "Dark Web," where the purveyors conceal their identities using encrypted communications — makes it a prime market for these goods, which endanger consumers, undercut brand names and befuddle law enforcement.

A USA TODAY examination found a wide variety of knockoffs including exploding air bags that spew flames and chain saws whose handles can fall off, exposing the owners to rotating blades. Or seat belts that easily unfasten and flammable lithium batteries that act, unintentionally, as "pyrotechnic devices." 

"I thought (the counterfeit market) was all about fake Louis Vuitton purses," says Andy Shuttleworth, intellectual property unit chief for the National IPR Center. "But, wow, I quickly learned the dangers of this stuff."

A worldwide raid of 700 counterfeit websites by U.S., European and Hong Kong government authorities created a splash last December. But it has hardly made a ripple in what has turned into one of the most lucrative criminal enterprises on Earth. The virtual emporiums gird an underground economy that robs U.S. businesses of $250 billion a year in potential revenue and 750,000 jobs, the FBI estimates.

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