Amazon identified, seized, and disposed of more than six million counterfeit items in 2022 in its crackdown on the suppliers of infringing goods. According to the eCommerce giant’s annual Brand Protection Report, which was released Tuesday, that number is double the amount from a year earlier.

Amazon’s report signaled an acceleration of the pace at which counterfeit suppliers, websites, and goods are being taken down and trademark laws enforced. This includes items being sent to the company’s fulfillment network as Amazon works with brands and law enforcement to identify counterfeiters’ warehouses and shut them down.

As a result, Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) sued or referred for investigation over 1,300 criminals in the U.S., U.K., European Union, and China in 2022, up from 600 the previous year.

Amazon’s efforts are part of a broader global crackdown on counterfeiters, which have long plagued brand owners but were accelerated by the growth of eCommerce.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) made 27,000 seizures of IP-infringing goods worth more than $3.3 billion in 2021, a $2 billion increase from 2020. And more than 24,000 of those seizures were tied to items shipped through international mail and express courier services, rather than containers, and 51% of which originated in China and Hong Kong, the CPB said.

In the case of Amazon, the company stopped 800,000 attempts to create new selling accounts in 2022. Due in part to seller verification tools and machine learning-based detection, this number decreased from 2.5 million attempts in 2021 and from six million attempts in 2020.

Along those lines, Amazon published a “blueprint” in 2022 for partnership between the public and private sectors to stop counterfeiters. This included the exchange of information with law enforcement around the world as well as with other retailers.

“We will continue to invest and innovate until we drive counterfeits to zero in our store,” Amazon’s VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services Dharmesh Mehta said in the report. “While the industry still has a long way to go in driving the right public and private sector partnerships, we are excited about our progress and what we can do together to hold bad actors accountable.”

As part of that effort, more than 16,000 brands had enrolled in Amazon’s IP Accelerator by the end of 2022. The program enables small- and medium-sized businesses to obtain IP rights and brand protection more efficiently through affiliated law firms in 29 countries and 13 languages.

IP Accelerator also expedites a brand’s access to Amazon’s Brand Registry. The average number of valid infringement notices submitted by brands in the Brand Registry decreased by 35% from 2021.

Moving forward, the tools used by bad actors will only become more sophisticated. However, the technology available to IP owners and retailers as they fight against counterfeiters will also continue to evolve. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to serve as a meaningful tool to provide attorneys, judges, and businesses with better insight into trademarks.