In addition to reducing the prevalence of misleading or outright phoney product reviews on its site, e-commerce giant Amazon has this week announced plans to combat the presence of items which rip off designs from other brands.

Reuters reports that as part of this process Amazon will be handing information to the authorities in order to make it easier to target manufacturers and resellers that are leveraging its online marketplace to shift counterfeit products via safe shopping online.

The issue of fake goods being sold on legitimate sites like Amazon is not just problematic because it costs genuine companies cash to have their intellectual property stolen and reproduced without licensing; it also damages reputations and can even put consumers in danger, since counterfeits are not usually subjected to the high safety standards as genuine items.

Prior to this point, Amazon would only give law enforcement agencies information about suspected counterfeiters if they perceived that the evidence would be significant enough to pursue. From now on, such information will be handed on at a much earlier stage, which will hopefully allow police to act more quickly to clamp down on counterfeiters who are trying to piggyback on the good reputation that Amazon has built for itself over the years.

This data will be made available to investigators both in Europe and in North America and is just the latest part of an ongoing push by Amazon to purge all fake products from its site.

Those fraudsters who try to sell counterfeit items on Amazon will now face serious legal action, and brands will have greater powers to pinpoint phoney products themselves so that they can be flagged for removal, reducing the amount of legwork involved in policing its marketplace service and giving customers better access to genuine goods.