While everyone cheers for Chinese athletes at the Tokyo Olympics for their good performance, Chinese online shopping platforms are staging a shopping spree for "the same masks worn by Olympic athletes," despite them being declared to be bogus products. 

As pictures showed on stores, the bogus products look the same as the ones that Chinese athletes are using at the Olympics, which have Chinese national flags on them, but most of the stores covered the national flag on their pictures.

This shopping spree continues despite Polay Pharmaceuticals, the company that produced the official masks for Chinese athletes at the Olympic Games, issued a statement on July 29, saying all related masks were bogus and sold illegally. 

"The masks were donated and tailored for China's athletes at the Tokyo Olympics. They are not for sale online. Selling bogus masks online suspected of using the national flag and logo of the Olympic Committee violates our intellectual copyrights," the company said in the statement. 

Polay Pharmaceuticals said they have no plan for mass production of the masks.

A working staff from a Taobao shop which is more like a grocery store told the Global Times on Thursday that their masks were produced by a standard pharmaceutical company. The staff declined to reveal more information. 

The Global Times learnt from several shops on Taobao selling the bogus masks that those masks were produced in East China's Zhejiang Province and were delivered to consumers from Zhejiang's Jinhua, a city well known for its small commodity industry. 

Liu Changsong, a Beijing-based lawyer, told the Global Times on Thursday that those online stores and mask products violate China Trademark Law and National Flag Law. 

If the circumstances are severe, they will be suspected of committing crime of counterfeiting a registered trademark and must be investigated for criminal responsibility. 

Source: Global Time