Experts from Bulgaria's Interior Ministry warn about wide-spread fraud involving fake brand name fashion sold mainly over the internet through the so-called virtual shopping malls.

The goods include fake "Armani," "Prada," and other labels, made in illegal Chinese or Turkish shops, perfumes and accessories offered for prices over 10 times lower than the originals.

Probes of the Bulgarian Unit for Combating Organized Crime (GDBOP) show these malls sell each about 30 items daily. Customers, who buy them, are attracted by glamorous pictures and cannot make the difference between the original and the replicas.

The risk of purchasing a fake label, however, spreads to real stores since many "upscale" boutiques order fashion through these virtual malls.

GDBOP inform the number of such malls skyrocketed recently and requires round-the-clock monitoring of merchandise distributors and owners of Bulgarian internet shopping sites.

According to police experts, Bulgaria has also turned into some sort of a warehouse from where fake labels are shipped all over Europe. The goods enter the country either through sea ports or on coach buses arriving from Greece and Turkey as it was the case with the now-closed virtual store mallvm.com. The raid then discovered that the two brothers behind the fraud had a list of bus carriers and travel agents they used to import the fake items and then redistributed them to customers across Bulgaria through courier services.

"You can go to Italy and buy brand name fashion for EUR 5 000, and from there go to a Turkish factory and order replicas of them. You can have them in a matter of days," a store owner in downtown Sofia is quoted saying by the Bulgarian daily "Monitor," adding the price of good-quality fake items is relatively high, which also misleads customers they are purchasing an original.

Velizar Sokolov, expert on copyrights is further cited, telling a story how a female participant in the Bulgarian version of the "Big Brother" reality show had been proudly and non-stop wearing a baseball cap with the Louis Vuitton logo, convinced it was an original because she purchased it from a store in the city of Plovdiv for BGN 100.

According to Sokolov, in the first 10 months of 2010, business police and Customs have busted 113 000 fake sports goods and the losses are estimated at EUR 11.3 M.

Over 90% of the replicas are made in illegal Chinese shops located in apartments, basements and shacks, and employing child labor.