Alibaba said big data technologies have helped it detect more than 61,000 individuals or groups suspected of operating shops that sell counterfeit goods on Taobao, its online shopping portal. In addition, it has detected 1,640 factories that produce fake goods and supply them to online dealers, Zheng Junfang, Alibaba’s Chief Platform Governance Officer, said at a media briefing. Taobao closed 180,000 stores from March last year to February which were found to have sold counterfeit items. “The people who control such online shops and benefit from selling counterfeits are not usually the people who register as being responsible for the shops. They use other people’s ID to hide their real identities, but big data technologies have allowed us to detect and locate them,” Zheng said. The location of the behind-the-scene big bosses was related to industrial clusters in different regions. “We’ll try our best to block vendors with bad reputations from re-entering our shopping portal, no matter how they disguise their identities,” Zheng said.