Blog: Who buys all the fake handbags on the internet?

When I'm a little lonely, I tend to spend a lot of time looking at random things on Ebay

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My French husband is holidaying in France. I am not. This means I'm a little lonely, and when I'm a little lonely, I tend to spend a lot of time looking at random things on Ebay.

Last night, at 1.09am, I was bidding on a vintage 1950s handbag, which I won for a mere £8.04, thanks to dollars being more fun than pounds or Euros.

Trawling through page upon page of vintage salt and pepper shakers (of course I don't need another flamingo themed one, but it doesn't mean I don't want it) I decided to look at things from the modern day, for a change.

I'm not an avid shopper of new stuff, apart from food. After all, I make t-shirts for Red Hot Ruby and work from home, so the only things I really need are – you've guessed it – t-shirts, and pyjamas. I wear them all year round – the t-shirts, and the pyjamas - sometimes adding a sweatshirt on top when it gets cold, which despite it being summer - is now.

I also wear jeans every single day, so I have a faint interest in vintage Lee or vintage Levis, but that's about it. I don't own a single designer item, and that's fine by me.

Admittedly, if my husband came home with Mulberry's Ostrich Bayswater bag I would pass out, then surgically attach it to my right arm for the rest of my life, not just because it's a nice bag, but because I would be adopting the 'steal my bag, steal me!' policy for any prospective thief, which I imagine would be fairly off-putting. It's a lovely bag, but it's not worth re-mortgaging my flat for.

Back to last night and ebay. I decided to type in some fancy names – Dolce & Gabbana, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Chloe – and see what popped up. I really wanted to see how many counterfeit items popped up, and whether, as someone who has no idea what a Chloe Paddington bag looks like, I could tell straight away that something fishy was going on. It turns out I could.

A Chloe Paddington bag was being sold by a 'working mum with a 23-month-old child who needs to turn out her wardrobe to make some money for our new baby's nursery fees'. Really? I was intrigued.

Not only did the seller fill us in on her personal life (do I really need to know that her IVF treatment has been successful? I'm just after a bag, not a new friend) but she also happens to have the biggest wardrobe known to man. Checking her feedback revealed that she's sold over 100 bags recently, all with tags, and all for the same reason – the nursery fees.

Oddly, she has even sold the same bag, several times over. Buyers have all left positive feedback, so happy are they with their knock-off goods. Clearly this seller lays on the personal drivel so that naive, or more likely wanabee WAGs fall for it. Quite frankly, I'm surprised their acrylic finger nails allow for any frantic last minute bidding.

Ebay have just paid out £30 million to the Louis Vuitton empire, and £20,000 to Hermes for allowing counterfeit goods which claim to be authentic under their name. Why, I wonder, are so many people still getting away with it? More to the point, why are people buying it?

To my utter astonishment (I almost choked on grape when I saw it) there is even a website called www.chloepaddington.co.uk which actually admits they sell fake Chloe bags, and has a nice selection of styles and colours for you to choose from, at a tenth of the price.

It says 'massive savings on Chloe handbags' – surely that's not quite correct. 'Massive savings on nothing because they're fake Chloe handbags' might be more appropriate. I just don't understand how it's allowed to go on.

They even have the front to state that 'Buying replica Chloe bags and other fake designer handbags has been the best choice many people have made'. Jesus wept, could they be any more blatant? In short, no.

I sell ethically produced t-shirts on Red Hot Ruby. They are produced under strict Fair Wear Foundation guidelines in Europe. They are designed, hand-printed and folded by me and the cat in Brighton. If I didn't genuinely care about the environment, and human rights, I guess I could just buy up some crap from China that I've had printed there for £1.50 all-in and lie.

Who's going to know if my products are genuine or not? I don't think fake Red Hot Ruby t-shirts are something I'll have worry about yet, but you see my point. I could just as easily do it the cheap and nasty way, but I won't.

However, I do have an idea on how to raise some much needed cash so that I can print my autumn stock.  I'm going to pop to the butchers and get myself a bag of pig's kidneys, then list them on ebay as human kidneys, and maybe someone on dialysis will snap those up for a Buy It Now price of £800. After two weeks of trading, perhaps I could move to the Bahamas, or at the very least, buy myself a real Mulberry bag.

Then again, why not buy 10 fake ones and re-sell them as authentic? Everyone else seems to be doing it, which begs the question – who are the real fools? Those of us who don't buy fake goods, or those who do?