The Luxury Handbag SCAM is Finally Collapsing (and China is Behind It)

The Handbag SCAM is Finally Collapsing (and China is Behind It) - In the early hours of a morning in 2024, Milan labour inspectors walked into a leather workshop on the city's industrial outskirts and found men asleep on cardboard between the sewing machines. The machines were still warm. Electricity records for the building showed production running straight through the night, straight through the weekend, straight through the holiday. The safety guards had been unscrewed from several machines so hands could move faster across the blades. None of the men in that room had a work contract on file. Nobody in that workshop was making a counterfeit. Every bag coming off those tables was completely, legally, verifiably real. Here is what those bags cost to make. Fifty-three euros. Here is what one of them sold for. Up to nine thousand five hundred dollars. Fifty miles away, a different workshop was turning out women's handbags for a different label at thirty-five to seventy-five euros each, retailing between one thousand nine hundred and two thousand two hundred. A third was producing men's jackets for one hundred and thirty-seven to one hundred and forty-nine euros that left the shop floor priced at six thousand two hundred dollars. Three separate supply chains. Three separate luxury houses. The same arithmetic, almost to the decimal.