Just two months after WTR identified Mulebuy as the go-to Chinese shopping agent for replica buyers, the platform appears to have been shut down.
Reports of a police raid, a sealed warehouse and an effective shutdown have sent users scrambling for alternatives, in the latest demonstration of the vulnerability of China’s shopping agent ecosystem.
Shopping agents act as intermediaries between overseas customers and sellers on Chinese platforms such as Taobao, Weidian and 1688. Typically, the agent purchases goods on a user’s behalf, receives them at a warehouse in China, photographs them for quality control and consolidates purchases into international shipments.
The model has legitimate uses. However, since 2017 WTR has reported that some shopping agents have been embraced by online communities dedicated to acquiring counterfeit and ‘replica’ fashion.
In April 2024, Chinese authorities raided the offices and warehouses of Pandabuy, the highest-profile shopping agent at the time, following investigations involving numerous rights holders.
More than 30 individuals were subject to criminal measures and millions of parcels were found across a warehouse network covering approximately 100,000 square metres.
Since then, the market has repeatedly reorganised.
In June 2026, WTR reported that Mulebuy had emerged as the most prominent successor to Pandabuy. The platform appeared to have become the recommended agent of the 2.2 million-member FashionReps subreddit and have partnered on a “Mulebuy x FashionReps Summer Community Event”.
Mulebuy previously told WTR that it prohibited the purchase and transportation of branded products and immediately destroyed counterfeit goods found in its warehouses.
Last month, community sources began to share unconfirmed reports of a raid at a Mulebuy warehouse. One moderator said that more than 10 sellers had independently confirmed that an enforcement action had occurred.
A subsequently deleted moderator announcement on the FashionReps forum, seen by WTR, claimed that Mulebuy “recently underwent local government investigation and raid”, while stating that several vendors had alleged that the platform was involved in a “pipeline of production for LV-branded products”.
Another community moderator stated that the raid occurred on 3 August and that Mulebuy’s warehouse was sealed. One warned users shortly afterwards that the platform would “most likely not be coming back”.
A moderator of a Mulebuy-focused subreddit separately reported: “Mulebuy’s warehouse was raided and the business has effectively shut down. Details on the ‘why’ are still murky and mostly speculation at this point, but the outcome is clear: Mulebuy is done, and it’s not coming back.”
WTR attempted to access the Mulebuy website at the time of writing, but it appears to be offline. A website server checker states that it is “down for everyone”.
It is important to note that the claims that Mulebuy has shut down remain unverified.
WTR is unaware of any public statement by Chinese law enforcement, Mulebuy or Louis Vuitton about the alleged raid.
WTR has contacted Mulebuy but has not yet received a response. Louis Vuitton declined to comment.
Closer attention on shopping agent operations
Martin Evans, brand protection consultant at Rouse, says that he believes the reported Mulebuy action shows brand owners are paying closer attention to shopping agent activity, and that "Pandabuy was not a one-off".
Rather than trying to predict the ‘next Pandabuy’, however, Evans suggests that concerned brand owners should focus on mapping the infrastructure and communities that enable replica buyers to migrate between agents.
“There is [interest] between cheap agents and reliable agents,” Evans explains. “The bigger impact would be if these reliable ‘pillars’ for the shopping agent community are targeted.”
Brand owners also need to be aware that the shopping agent model is evolving. Evans points to Hacoo, formerly known as SaraMart, as one example of a different model. Unlike traditional shopping agents, through which users can monitor individual items entering a warehouse and receive quality-control photographs, Hacoo’s underlying fulfilment process is less visible to customers, Evans says.
Such developments suggest that the industry is moving towards a split between traditional agents and “more layered fulfilment/marketplace models”, where the platform’s precise role and infrastructure can be harder to observe, Evans claims.
“This adds to the complexity,” he says.
Asked whether rights holders should move attention away from consumer-facing platforms towards fulfillment operators, logistics services and other intermediaries, Evans says: “A location where goods are consolidated will remain the weak point.”
“Ultimately, the shopping agent business model has two fundamental weaknesses," he claims. The parcels must be consolidated in one or more locations, and the agent cannot claim to be merely a platform when it is handling and often photographing the goods.
Therefore, from an enforcement perspective, Evans says: “As long as the business model provides some form of consolidated warehousing location, then it remains vulnerable.”
“At the very basic level, starting with a traditional ‘raid’ on physical goods and working with law enforcement to tie together the rest of the operation is feasible,” he suggests.
Intelligence gathering should therefore encompass warehouse addresses, corporate links, logistics arrangements, payments, social media promotion and the communities sending users towards particular agents. That intelligence can offer a clearer picture of the wider operation.
Coordination between brand owners is perhaps a bigger challenge.
“Most brand owners have overlooked shopping agents,” Evans argues, in part because their sales volumes are difficult to measure and cross-border investigations require resources beyond the day-to-day enforcement capabilities of many brand protection departments.
“There are only a few major brand owners, footwear and luxury in particular, that can clearly see the volumes of counterfeits passing through these agents, and have the resources to tackle these cases,” he says. “Most brand owners could not, on their own, justify the cost and complexity.”
For this reason, he says, brand owners “should be much more active in forming coalitions”.
“There is far too little information and cost-sharing in brand protection teams,” Evans claims. “It is rare that a brand owner individually takes up the lead.”
Nevertheless, the Pandabuy operation set a precedent for such collaboration. Intelligence supplied by rights holders and private sector investigators contributed to an investigation that ultimately targeted a physical network far larger than was visible through Pandabuy’s consumer-facing website.
Pandabuy remains non-operational as a result, and Evans says that Rouse understands a prosecution is ongoing.
However, replica shoppers did not disappear.
“The phenomenon of counterfeit shopping apps/agents will not go away,” Evans says. But with bad actors more conscious of the enforcement risk, “business models will [likely] become more distributed and smaller scale”, he suggests.
This article was first published on WTR in September 2026: Reports of Mulebuy raid signal China’s shopping agent ecosystem shifts again