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Almost 100 fake Labubu dolls were seized by police in Liverpool who have warned about the risks posed by buying counterfeit toys.

Merseyside Police carried out a joint operation alongside Liverpool City Council’s Trading Standards team in the city centre on Tuesday, and found the fake dolls on sale for £7.99 each.

The distinctive furry monster-like soft toys, manufactured by Chinese firm Pop Mart, have rocketed in popularity recently.

However, police said fake versions can pose risks including toxic paint, sharp edges or unsafe stuffing.

The seizures were made from two shops on Ranelagh Street and Church Street and coincided with the launch of a national campaign entitled Fake Toys, Real Harms, led by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).

The IPO said fake toys can also pose choking risks to young children and be constructed with chemicals linked to increased risks of cancer.

One counterfeit Labubu doll inspected by Merseyside Police was found to be poorly constructed, with its head and feet twisting and loosening easily.

The force said its internal stuffing also tore open with minimal force.

Sgt Richard Clare said: “We understand that some people may not see the harm in buying counterfeit toys, especially when they’re cheaper or appear similar to the real thing.

“But behind these fake products are serious risks – not just to children’s safety, but to our communities.

“Counterfeit and illicit goods are rarely just about fake products. They’re often linked to wider criminal networks that cause real harm.”

The force said nationally more than 200,000 counterfeit Labubu dolls have been seized before reaching UK consumers, accounting for around 90% of all counterfeit toys seized in the UK this year.

Experts have since valued the haul at nearly £3.3 million.

Tests on the seized toys found 75% failed critical safety tests.

A private Chinese company is giving preferential access to its technology and providing unusually beneficial payment terms on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of specialized equipment to a firm partially owned by Eric Trump, according to industry sources and Securities and Exchange Commission records.

The company, Bitmain, has faced concerns over the potential national security risks of its technology, with one Republican congressman asking the treasury department to review some of its business dealings in the United States.

American Bitcoin Corporation was founded in March, just two months after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Eric Trump currently has a 7.5% stake in the company, SEC filings show. Created through a daisy chain of mergers, and majority owned by a company called Hut 8, American Bitcoin went public with overwhelming publicity on 3 September on the Nasdaq exchange. Though the phenomenal stock profits of the Trump venture have been previously reported, the fact that Bitmain appears to be providing preferential access and payment terms to the operation has not been previously reported.

Filings by American Bitcoin with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that the company is purchasing more than 16,000 advanced mining machines – servers that process complex math problems to earn Bitcoin – from Bitmain.

The SEC filings indicate that American Bitcoin is paying Bitmain in “pledged” bitcoin – rather than cash – which could be redeemed up to two years from now, at a current price. An industry expert said he was briefed on the American Bitcoin deals and that Bitmain was offering the company unique and favorable terms, with little money down, and such a long period of time for redeeming their collateral.

‘Business of politics’

In May, at a Las Vegas bitcoin conference sponsored by Bitmain, the president of American Bitcoin, Matt Prusak, underscored the political nature of the bitcoin industry. “If you think you’re in the energy business or compute business or bitcoin business you’re half right,” he told the audience. “Underneath it all you’re in the business of politics, in the politics business.”

Favorable treatment by Bitmain is a main ingredient of the American Bitcoin venture. “Preferential access” to the technology it buys from Bitmain is “central to American Bitcoin’s ability to maintain a structural cost advantage”, according to an American Bitcoin press release last month.

In a statement to the Guardian, Bitmain said “technical cooperation” with American Bitcoin’s majority owner Hut 8 was specific to one type of mining machine, and was with Hut 8 rather than American Bitcoin. Hut 8 and American both list the same address in Miami on filings with the US government, and Hut 8 handles all of American Bitcoin’s operations and infrastructure.

Bitmain, in its statement to the Guardian, said it offers “pledged bitcoin” to other customers. But in a May announcement the company said it would offer a six-month redemption period for these pledges, not a 24-month term, as it offers American Bitcoin.

Experts say American Bitcoin’s special access to Bitmain’s technology and financing terms raise concerns that the Chinese entity views business with the Trump sons as an opportunity to try to influence the Trump administration on a variety of issues: crypto regulation, energy, or China policy.

“The disclosed terms are pretty unusual,” said James Angel, a finance professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “It’s one thing to extend credit. But the weird part is: ‘you have the option to buy back when you’re mining at a discount,’” he said. “If the president’s family was involved it brings up the obvious question of whether Bitmain is trying to get special treatment.”

Even the appearance of impropriety can be problematic, said Eric Chaffee, a professor of law at Case Western, who cautioned that at the same time all the facts are not known. “This does look a bit like a sweetheart deal where the reason they are doing this is to curry some influence with the Trump administration,” he said. “This looks bad but at the same time there could be underlying facts that make it a fair deal.”

A spokesperson for Hut 8, Gautier Lemyze-Young, did not dispute the financing terms involved bitcoin with a 24-month window but said the terms were agreed to “in September 2024 long before the launch of American Bitcoin”.

The transaction at issue, though, was done by American Bitcoin, and was revealed in August 2025.

‘Off to the races’

On the day American Bitcoin went public a company executive posted a photo of the team, including Eric and Don Jr, on X, with the phrase “And we are off to the races.”

Lemyze-Young said in the statement that the close work with the Chinese company stemmed from a longstanding relationship and was due to “results, not politics or external affiliations”.

Eric Trump did not respond to detailed requests for comment emailed to American Bitcoin and the Trump Organization, where he is executive vice-president.

A former company executive who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Guardian that the Trump family involvement, announced publicly in March, was known months earlier to insiders as the mergers were organized to form American Bitcoin. “We knew well in advance that they were involved. That’s why we wanted to do it,” he said, referring to a merger. “They have some access at the White House. Better than not having it. That’s certainly a bonus.”

It is not the first crypto venture of the Trump family to raise questions about foreign influence. An entirely separate Trump cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, which has no ties to American Bitcoin except the Eric Trump ownership, announced in May that the United Arab Emirates would use its stablecoin in a transaction in which it made a $2bn investment involving a separate cryptocurrency exchange.

But American Bitcoin stands out in part because so many threads intersect with US policy: Trump has announced a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve”, which may help drive up bitcoin’s price; has loosened regulations on energy, which is key to cheap bitcoin mining; and has launched policies on China that often seem to pivot back and forth between aggressive economic confrontation and conciliation.

Eric Trump has been promoting American Bitcoin and the stock, appearing with company executives at investor forums and business news broadcasts, repeating that the Trump family had turned to cryptocurrency because it was “debanked” following the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

“We developed a company named American Bitcoin. We are one of the biggest bitcoin mining companies on Earth,” he told a conference last month, claiming the price of bitcoin would shoot to a million dollars, an eightfold increase from the present.

Bitmain is not regulated by US agencies but there have been concerns about the company’s technology. Last month the Republican congressman Zachary Nunn, of Iowa, pressed the treasury department to review Bitmain and another Chinese bitcoin company. In a statement to the Guardian, Nunn wrote: “American families deserve to know that our power grid, digital infrastructure, and national security aren’t being compromised by foreign entities with opaque ownership and ties to hostile regimes.”

In Bitmain’s statement to the Guardian, the company said it responded to his office, and said it “strictly complies with US and applicable laws and regulations and has never engaged in activities that pose risks to US national security”.