Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Yesterday, the European Commission slapped AliExpress with the largest fine yet under the Digital Services Act (DSA), exceeding $625 million.
In a press release, the EC said that AliExpress failed to “diligently assess and mitigate risks relating to the sale of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products on its e-commerce platform.”
Officials found that AliExpress not only failed to staff teams dedicated to removing counterfeit and dangerous items from the platform, but it also made it easy for bad actors to evade detection.
Staff was so limited that some content moderators were sometimes given just “tens of seconds” to evaluate if a flagged product met EU standards, The Guardian reported. The result, the EC said, was that it “found millions of products that reappeared online” after being flagged for removal, “which sometimes stayed for longer than a month.”
Bad actors can easily skirt AliExpress safeguards, the EC said. All some sellers had to do to circumvent automatic takedowns was miscategorize their products so that fewer checks were required before posting dangerous goods.
For shady sellers, the risks of detection appeared low. The e-commerce site’s mandatory brand authorization system was also ineffective and understaffed, the EC found, and AliExpress did not penalize traders for selling illegal products as its policy claims it would.
Making things worse, AliExpress “inadequately assessed how its recommender and advertising systems exacerbate the spread of illegal products,” the EC said. So rather than remove illegal products, AliExpress was recommending them to consumers and helping to maximize exposure. Talking to the press, the European Union’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, noted that one in five Europeans shop monthly at retail sites like AliExpress, Temu, and Shein.
AliExpress also relied on a single quantitative metric to gauge how effectively its systems were working to weed out illegal products. And that metric did not properly measure the extent of the harm. EC testing found that “a high volume of illegal products”—including unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics—“continued to circulate despite AliExpress’ moderation efforts.”
In June 2025, AliExpress was ordered to bring its platform into compliance with the DSA but failed to make the necessary changes, the EC said. The fine was calculated to be proportionate to the nature of the violations, which the EC considered “particularly serious infringements,” and to penalize AliExpress’s delayed interventions to mitigate flagged risks.
The fine dwarfs prior penalties that Temu and X were ordered to pay for the earliest DSA violations.
Last December, X was the first to be fined. Among other violations, X was ordered to pay nearly $140 million after Elon Musk started selling blue checkmarks as the only way to verify an account. The Commission found that the change made it easier to deceive users on X, and the DSA “clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place,” the EC said.
Temu was then fined more than $225 million after evidence showed that consumers in the EU were very likely to encounter illegal items on Temu.
Reacting to its much larger fine, AliExpress told Ars it was “surprised” by the “disproportionate” fine.
AliExpress said it plans to appeal the decision, claiming the EC ignored its “sound risk management framework and the significant, proactive enhancements we have made.” The massive online retailer noted that its EU market is substantially smaller than its China market and said that it invests “substantial resources in risk assessment and mitigation, product safety and consumer protection” and “has been and continues to be committed to meeting our obligations to consumers.”
On Sunday, however, Virkkunen, the EU tech chief, said e-commerce giants can’t rely on scale as an excuse for failing to police illegal goods.
“The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online—it is a failure by AliExpress to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act,” Virkkunen said. “Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online.”
