They expect the takedown. Professional counterfeit operations treat removals as a cost of doing business and have the re-listing playbook ready before the first complaint lands. The listing comes back under a new seller account, often within days, with slightly altered photos and a tweaked product title. If your enforcement stops at the single listing, you are playing a game the other side has already solved.
The most common move is the cleanest: abandon the flagged account and open a new one. Marketplaces make seller onboarding fast, which is great for legitimate sellers and equally great for counterfeiters. Watch for new accounts selling your exact catalog within a week of a removal, especially ones with no sales history and stock photos. The product images are usually the same set with minor crops or filters applied, which is why image matching beats keyword monitoring.
When accounts survive, the listing changes instead. Titles get reworded to dodge your brand keywords, prices shift by a few percent, and the product photos rotate. Some sellers split one listing into several variants so the next takedown only kills a fraction of their presence. This is deliberate: every variation forces your team to file again from scratch, and the delay between detection and removal is pure selling time for them.
The fix is treating the seller, not the listing, as the enforcement target. Keep a permanent watch list of removed sellers and scan for their fingerprints: image hashes, supplier patterns, shipping origins, and catalog overlap. File against the network when the same operator pops up under a new name, and push the marketplace to link the accounts. Takedown count stops mattering at this point. The metric that matters is how long a removed operator stays down, and that only improves when re-listing gets harder than starting over.