A tip in September 2025 sent investigators undercover. Nine months later, a warrant closed in on a counterfeit network worth more than LKR 5 million.
The case began quietly in September 2025, when intelligence reached ATB Intellectual Property suggesting a local trader was dealing in counterfeit auto parts. Rather than move immediately, ATB investigators spent months building the case from the ground up — visiting the shop undercover, buying suspected fakes off the shelf, and quietly documenting what they found. Every sample went back to the rights holder for authentication, a slow and deliberate process designed to make sure that when the case reached police, it would hold up.
Once the rights holder confirmed the products were fake, ATB assembled a full enforcement file — trademark records, evidence from the undercover buys, and genuine parts for comparison — and handed it to Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID). With search warrants secured, CID officers and ATB investigators moved in together.
On the ground, telling real from fake wasn’t always obvious to the naked eye — sorting genuine parts from a growing pile of fakes. As the search progressed, the shop owner offered a detail that mattered more than any single seized part: the counterfeit goods had been imported. That admission, combined with evidence gathered on-site, pointed investigators to a supplier already linked to a separate counterfeit auto parts case elsewhere — a potential thread into a larger network supplying fake parts across the region.
By the end of the search, authorities had seized nearly 1,000 counterfeit auto parts across 23 categories — spark plugs, air filters, chain sprockets, brake components, rollers, wiring harnesses, speedometers, fuel tanks, and an assortment of motorcycle body parts, an inventory that hints at just how deeply counterfeit components had worked their way into ordinary motorcycle maintenance and repair.
The shop owner was arrested on the spot, gave a statement, and was later released on police bail. The seized goods are now in the custody of the relevant court, where the case will move forward under Sri Lanka’s intellectual property laws.
For ATB Intellectual Property, the outcome is less about one shop than what it reveals about the wider trade in counterfeit parts. Months of patient, undercover groundwork are what turned a rumour into a prosecutable case and a lead into a possible network. The firm says that same approach, pairing technical verification with close coordination with law enforcement, remains central to how it works with authorities and rights holders across the region.