Over the years that I spent in China I can remember numerous occasions where I would be shopping for something on Taobao or another Chinese e-commerce site and have a Chinese friend look over my shoulder and ask if I’d like some help. This offer usually wasn’t negotiable, they were basically saying, “You’re a foreigner and don’t know how to shop online in China and it’s my responsibility to save you.” More often than not, they were correct.

Back then, online shopping in China was much different than in the United States. The Chinese platforms were full of scammers, counterfeiters and products where there was no way to tell if they really were what it said on the package. These sites were so notorious that when I would return to the U.S. I’d breathe a sigh of relief that I could again order products with confidence from proven American e-commerce platforms like Amazon.

Unfortunately, these days are no more. As Chinese e-commerce sites like Taobao cracked down on counterfeiters -- removing 380 million items and 180,000 merchants -- Amazon, eBay and Walmart opened their doors and invited them right in, degenerating their own marketplaces into cesspools of counterfeit, fake, potentially hazardous, and otherwise unregulated products. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, China is the source of 86% of the world’s counterfeits. According to Marketplace Pulse, Chinese sellers now make up 25% of Amazon's U.S. marketplace. There is a direct correlation here.

Legal impunity for everyone

In 2015, Amazon won a lawsuit that removed them from legal liability for what third party vendors sold on their site, and this decision perhaps not coincidentally coincided with a big push to get more Chinese vendors selling to people in the U.S. -- including the creating of a special maritime agreement which allows Chinese merchants to ship full container loads of products straight to Amazon’s U.S. warehouses. That, combined with the USPS’s policy of providing Chinese merchants with subsidized shipping rates (enabling them to mail parcels to the U.S. cheaper than it costs to mail the same parcel domestically), means that U.S. markets were opened wide for the exact same "bad actors" who have long polluted China’s e-commerce ecosystem.

If engaging in cross-border e-commerce, copyright, trademark and consumer safety laws no longer apply, the offenders of the crimes are outside the legal jurisdiction of U.S. courts and Amazon and eBay cannot yet be held accountable.

On top of that, e-commerce sites like Amazon, eBay and Walmart lack effecting vetting system for new sellers, U.S. customs is unable to properly screen parcels coming in from abroad, and the American legal system is embarrassingly inept at protecting its citizens from foreign criminals shipping in illegal items. In this climate, counterfeit and dangerous products flow freely over U.S. borders and into the homes of U.S. citizens, and nobody with any power seems willing or able to do anything about it.

Buyer beware

When shopping online in the U.S., the mantra of the day is clearly “buyer beware.”

Over the past six years Craig Crosby he has been leading a movement against the $1.7 trillion per year criminal counterfeiting enterprise via The Counterfeit Report, a consumer advocacy organization that has been featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, Al-Jazeera, Fox News TV, 20/20, as well as here on Forbes.com. He runs a team of researchers and engineers who not only find, identify, and confirm counterfeits from numerous sources, but also collects them as well -- bagging and tagging them to the standards of law enforcement in the event that they are ever needed as evidence in the various lawsuits that he participates in.

Among other things, Crosby and his team has found the following items being sold to Americans via our big e-commerce sites: Gucci, Chanel, Prada perfumes that contain urine, bacteria, antifreeze, beryllium (a carcinogen), cadmium, and lead; “Apple” chargers that catch on fire; 1.8 million fake "official U.S. military" tourniquets that tend to break when used; smoke detectors that are nothing but plastic boxes with push button alarms; counterfeit Phillip halogen automobile headlights; and bee pollen laced with methamphetamine.

“That's kind of neat,” he jested, “I’m going to go try bee pollen as a supplement to see if it makes me feel better and, wow, I feel great! I'm taking methamphetamine! What a great supplement!”

Changing his tone, Crosby then told me about an inquiry that he received from a school who sent 30 kids home with chargers for their iPads which subsequently caught some of their beds on fire.

Beyond that, Amazon has been hit with a class action lawsuit for facilitating the sale of solar eclipse glasses from China that didn’t work, a woman in the U.K. had her eyes glued close by counterfeit makeup she bought on eBay, and Mark Elliot of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global IP Center pointed out that, “From fake medicines to bad brakes and lead-laden toys, counterfeit goods pose a real danger to consumers and a costly threat to the business community,” in a landmark report entitled Measuring the Magnitude of Global Counterfeiting.