U.S. Customs Seizes Counterfeit and Unapproved Goods at FedEx, UPS and DHL Hubs

The Analysis

On 29 June, U.S. Customs and Border Protection listed a new set of forfeiture notices for commercial cargo seized at express-delivery hubs: FedEx and UPS facilities in Anchorage, Alaska, and a DHL hub in Atlanta. The Anchorage entries carry a publication start date of 26 June and a deadline of 26 July to file a claim. The Atlanta entries run from 26 June to a publication end date of 26 July, with a claim deadline of 25 August. CBP states that if no qualifying claim is filed, the property will be declared forfeited to the United States and disposed of according to law. One line from the source matters more than the rest: this is a legal notice of seizure and intent to forfeit, not a criminal indictment. On a customs desk that distinction decides what kind of folder you open.

Here is what I look at first, and it is never the headline. It is the airwaybill. Every one of these lines started as a parcel with a number on it, and that number is the only thing connecting a notice on a public register to a box sitting in a hub and to an invoice in somebody's accounts-payable system. If I cannot match the notice to a waybill inside a day, I am not working a seizure, I am working a rumour.

The scope and the exceptions of a federal forfeiture notice are not my subject. Dr. Ingrid Voss has walked through the scope and exceptions of this federal requirement; here I only deal with what happens to the shipment. So: what is actually on these notices, what the clock looks like from the desk, and what has to be sitting in a folder before the window closes.

A forfeiture notice is a document about property. It says the government has taken something and intends to keep it unless a party with standing files a claim inside the window. What it does not say is who is guilty of anything, and the source is explicit that this is not an indictment. That framing matters in practice, because a team that reads seizure as criminal panic stops doing the one thing that helps, which is paperwork. The clock does not pause while people discuss blame.

Read the inventory line by line, because the shape of it tells you what kind of risk this is. At the FedEx port in Anchorage, CBP identified medical, cosmetic and consumer goods: lidocaine cream, body filler injectables, hyaluronic-acid products, syringes and botulinum-toxin products. The same Anchorage FedEx entries include 200 pairs of Apple AirPods 4 valued at $8,514, 100 pairs of AirPod Pros valued at $8,085, and 100 pairs of AirPods 4 with noise cancellation valued at $1,760. At the UPS courier hub in Anchorage, the listed electronic components are 40 Packard interface connectors or cables valued at $5,324, 300 cable-accessory connectors valued at $5,070, 73 high-frequency relays valued at $9,271, and 1,760 RITS connector header assemblies valued at $11,088. The DHL Atlanta hub entries cover bank cards and counterfeit bank cards.

Do the division, because the unit values are the part that should make an importer sit up. Eight thousand five hundred fourteen dollars across 200 pairs is $42.57 a pair. Eight thousand eighty-five across 100 is $80.85. One thousand seven hundred sixty across 100 is $17.60. On the component side, $5,324 across 40 units is $133.10, $5,070 across 300 is $16.90, $9,271 across 73 relays is $127.00, and $11,088 across 1,760 header assemblies is $6.30. Add the Anchorage lines and you get $18,359 of consumer electronics at the FedEx facility and $30,753 of electronic components at the UPS facility, which is $49,112 between them. That is not one container. It is a pile of small lines, and small lines are exactly what express carriers move. The exposure here is not a box-level exposure, it is a line-level one.

Now the clock, which is the only thing on this page that can actually cost you the goods. The Anchorage window runs 26 June to 26 July, thirty days. The Atlanta window runs 26 June to 25 August, sixty days. Thirty days sounds generous until you take out everything that has to happen inside it. Assume the mailed notice reaches the party five business days after publication, so around 3 July. Assume your broker needs two business days to pull the entry and the manifest. Assume the party who owns the goods needs three business days to produce purchase records and proof of payment.

Assume the file then sits with counsel for five business days, which is outside my scope and I am not going to advise on it. That is fifteen business days of work inside a window that has already lost five, and it puts your practical internal deadline somewhere around 10 July, not 26 July. Every parcel I have seen lost to a deadline was lost in the last third of the window, never in the first.

There is a habit worth building here and it costs nothing. The notices are published on a public register and can be searched by port code and by party name. Put someone on it for thirty minutes a week. Not because this batch is special, and I have already said one batch is not a pattern, but because the register is the only place where a seizure becomes visible before a customer calls to ask where the parcel is. A broker who finds out from the register has a week. A broker who finds out from a customer has an afternoon.

So what has to be in the folder. The notice itself, with the case number. The airwaybill. The entry number if the shipment was entered formally, and the clearance paperwork if it moved inside the carrier's own consolidated process; if you cannot answer which of the two it was in five minutes, that is itself a finding. The commercial invoice. Proof of payment, because ownership is proved with money trails and not with descriptions. Proof that the party filing is the party with standing, which on an express shipment is sometimes not the name printed on the waybill.

And one page that reconciles declared value, description and consignee, identical across every one of those documents. If the documents do not agree, everything downstream is trouble, and the mismatch I see most often is declared value. The notice puts the AirPods lines somewhere between $17.60 and $80.85 a pair. If your commercial invoice says something else for the same goods, that gap is the first thing an officer will ask about and the last thing anybody can fix after the fact.

Start with the tariff code, then look at whether the goods are admissible at all. That is how I was taught to open any file and it holds here. The Anchorage medical and cosmetic lines, the lidocaine cream, the filler injectables, the hyaluronic acid products, the syringes and the botulinum-toxin products, are the ones where I slow down, because what a product is called on an invoice and what it is under the tariff are two different questions, and some of these categories raise a further question about who may import them. I am not going to state a legal conclusion about any of that and nobody should take one from me. What I will say is documentary: if the description on your invoice is a marketing name rather than a product description, that is the document problem you can actually fix today, and it is the one that gets read first.

This has to be read by port, not by headline. Anchorage and Atlanta appear in the same batch of notices and they are not the same risk. Anchorage is where the medical, cosmetic and consumer electronics lines sit, and it is a gateway with a transshipment character for trans-Pacific express. Atlanta, in this batch, is bank cards and counterfeit bank cards: a different document set and a different kind of question entirely. One batch of notices does not give you a national pattern and I am not going to pretend it does. What it gives you is a reason to check your own gateway codes on the same register, on a schedule, instead of waiting for a story to reach you.

On the Atlanta lines specifically, there is one thing I would look at this week. If any part of your business moves payment cards in bulk through an express hub, the document question is not the same one it is for a cream or a connector. I am not going to tell you what the answer is. I am going to tell you that if you cannot produce, on request, the origin of the cards and the authority under which they were shipped, you have a document gap that no broker can close for you after the fact.

Now the arithmetic that justifies doing any of this before a notice ever arrives. Assume you run 300 US-bound express parcels a month. Assume 2% of them contain a regulated consumer health or cosmetic item of the kind on this list, which is six parcels. Assume an average declared value of $800 on those parcels, so $4,800 a month, or $57,600 a year of exposed declared value. Assume screening a parcel properly, checking the description, the classification and whether the consignee is a party who may receive it, takes four minutes. Screening all 300 is 20 hours a month; at a fully loaded $60 an hour that is $1,200 a month, or $14,400 a year. On my assumptions you spend about $14,400 to protect a $57,600 exposure, a ratio of roughly four to one, which is the kind of number a finance director signs. If your own numbers do not produce that ratio, do not build the control; go after the 2% instead.

The second calculation is the one nobody wants to have, and it is about whether a claim is worth filing at all. Assume one seized parcel with a declared value of $900. Assume the claim package, pulling the entry, the invoice, the payment proof and the ownership statement and getting it reviewed, takes eight hours of blended work at $75 an hour, which is $600. On those assumptions the break-even sits at a declared value of roughly $600; below that, the paperwork costs more than the goods. That is commercial arithmetic, not a legal opinion, and the decision belongs to the owner of the goods and whoever advises them. My job is to make sure they know the number before they decide, and to make sure the folder exists in case the answer turns out to be yes.

So what does the week look like. Day one: establish whether any of your shipments touched the named facilities in the window, by airwaybill rather than by memory. Day two: pull the entry and the invoice for anything that matches. Day three: reconcile declared value, description and consignee across those documents and write down every gap you find. By the end of the first week: get a decision from the owner of the goods on whether a claim is being pursued. Then build the file. A claim that arrives complete on 10 July is a different animal from one that arrives on 24 July with an explanation stapled to it.

One question decides more of these files than any other, and it is usually answered too late: who is the importer of record, and is that the same party as the one with standing to claim? On an express shipment the answer is frequently no. The seller may have shipped on terms that make it the importer. The buyer may have paid for goods it does not yet own. The carrier may have cleared the parcel inside its own consolidated process under a bond that names nobody you would recognise. When a notice arrives, the party who can file is the party who can prove it owned the goods, and that proof is a purchase record and a payment, not a waybill. If you ship on terms where title passes on delivery, work out now who holds title for a parcel sitting in a government warehouse, because in this batch that question has a date attached to it and the date is 26 July.

There are actually two clocks running and only one of them is printed on the notice. The second one is the clock with your customer, and it started the day they noticed the parcel had not arrived. Assume your service commitment to a key account is five business days. Assume a missed parcel triggers a credit of $75 under that contract. Assume six parcels are in play. That is $450 of credits, which is not a crisis on its own; what turns it into one is silence, because a customer who learns about a seizure from a tracking screen learns it at the worst possible moment and with the least possible context.

My rule here is simple and I have never regretted it: within 24 hours of confirming that a parcel is named in a notice, tell the customer three things, that it is being held, which documents you need from them, and by what date the folder has to be complete. Do not tell them it will be released. Nobody knows that yet, and a promise made in the first 24 hours is the one that gets quoted back at you in week three.

Quantities deserve a line of their own, and the notice shows why. One entry lists 1,760 connector header assemblies at $6.30 each; another lists 73 relays at $127.00. On a component shipment the count is the value, and a count is the easiest thing on a document to get wrong when parts are packed by weight or by reel. If your invoice says 1,760 and the parcel holds 1,800, the document no longer describes the goods, and a mismatch in quantity is treated the same way a mismatch in value is treated even when the money involved is trivial. I would put a physical count confirmation on any line where unit value is under $10. It sounds like an absurd control and it costs almost nothing, and those are exactly the lines that make a notice look like a carton of small parts rather than a parcel of finished goods.

And one thing I would stop doing this week, because it costs more than it saves. If you are describing goods on an express invoice with a generic term, a marketing name, or the single word parts, stop. The notices in this batch read like a list of product categories: creams, injectables, syringes, toxins, connectors, relays, header assemblies, bank cards. Those are the words that get read. A description that could mean anything invites the one question you least want asked, which is what is actually in the box. Put the product, the model and the count on the invoice and make it identical to the waybill. That is an hour of work on your template, and it is the cheapest control on this page.

Whatever the outcome, one seizure should change one rule. When the folder closes, I want three things written down: which document failed, which check would have caught it before the label was generated, and who owns putting that check in place. Then I want the file kept for at least two years, because a second notice naming the same party or the same commodity is far easier to handle with the first file in front of you, and because the pattern that matters to your business is not the national one, it is the one sitting in your own folder. I am not going to tell you that this batch predicts anything. I am telling you that the second time is always faster when the first time was written down.

The ways this goes wrong are boring and I have watched all of them. The declared value on the waybill is written down to save duty and the platform order record shows a different number, so both are now in the file and they contradict each other. The goods are described as a sample or a gift on an express shipment and there is no commercial invoice supporting any value at all. A consolidation contains one bad line and the whole master gets held, so the real cost is not the bad line, it is the twelve good ones sitting next to it. And the party named on the waybill is a trading company that never held title, so the person with standing is two emails away and does not know a clock is running.

Last thing, and it is the only sentence here I would underline. The notice says what happens if nobody files: the property is declared forfeited to the United States and disposed of according to law. That is not a threat, it is a default. Silence is a decision, and it is the decision that costs the most. This shipment can be saved, but the folder has to be finished this afternoon rather than next week. Once the deadline passes it stops being paperwork and becomes arithmetic, and the arithmetic is already done.

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— By Derek Xu