Beyond consumer protection in China: Profit-seeking practices of counterfeit hunters

This article moves beyond debates over motive and legitimacy to examine how profit-seeking among Chinese counterfeit hunters takes shape, operates, and produces social and regulatory consequences. Shaped by punitive damages, complaint and reporting mechanisms, and platform commerce, profit-seeking takes three forms: composite, professionalized, and predatory. Operationally, claiming compensation functions as the foundational practice, while agency services, content marketing, and training schools provide additional revenue paths. These practices burden merchants, generate derivative markets for countering counterfeit hunters, and occupy regulatory resources, prompting the state to turn from enabling consumer-led supervision to managing the supervisors themselves.