Greenhills Shopping Center in San Juan City remains a piracy hotspot flagged by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) for intellectual property (IP) violations.

In its 2025 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy, or the USTR’s Notorious Markets List, the American agency identified Greenhills as the lone physical market in the Philippines known for IP infringement, despite recent inroads in IP protection.

“Law enforcement authorities, in collaboration with right holders, have conducted raids at the mall, and the management at Greenhills Shopping Center has applied a three-strikes rule to take action against counterfeit sellers,” the USTR noted in the March 3 report.

“The management reports that almost 300 vendor stalls have been removed over the past year for selling counterfeit goods. The government, through the National Committee on Intellectual Property Rights (NCIPR), is working with right holders and shopping center management to implement a transition program to transform Greenhills Shopping Center into a high-end mall with legitimate sellers,” it added.

The USTR also lauded the NCIPR’s efforts to coordinate with the mall management and the city government to set up a pilot NCIPR help desk at Greenhills.

However, “although right holders have welcomed these developments, they also continue to observe a significant number of counterfeit goods and continue to wait and see if the transition program will resolve their concerns about the volume of counterfeit goods,” the USTR said.

In November last year, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) expressed optimism that the anti-piracy measures at Greenhills were enough to warrant the popular mall’s exclusion from the USTR’s watch list of notorious markets.

According to IPOPHL Acting Director General Nathaniel Arevalo, Greenhills Shopping Center’s management has been cooperative with the government in its efforts to purge the mall of counterfeit merchandise, a problem that has earned it an infamous reputation as a marketplace for knockoffs.

In IPOPHL’s submission to the USTR last October, Arevalo wrote that the Philippine government had made “significant progress” in addressing the sale of counterfeit and pirated goods at the shopping complex, enough to merit its removal from the watch list.

In the previous 2024 list, the USTR also identified Greenhills Shopping Center as the sole physical market in the Philippines still engaged in and benefiting from high levels of piracy and counterfeiting.

At the time, the USTR said the mall was popular on social media as a destination for purchasing bogus goods, with IP rights holders reporting high volumes of counterfeit products stored in secret rooms.

The USTR annually compiles the watch list to identify notorious physical and online markets that may cause harm to IP owners, workers, and consumers.

The USTR’s 2025 Notorious Markets List names 37 online markets and 32 physical markets reported to be involved in or facilitating significant trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy.

The USTR began identifying notorious markets in 2006 under the Special 301 Report and has published the Notorious Markets List separately each year since 2011 to raise awareness and strengthen IP enforcement efforts.