In this economy, even counterfeiters are trading down.

After years of knocking off luxury products like $2,800 Louis Vuitton handbags, criminals are discovering there is money to be made in faking the more ordinary  like $295 Kooba bags and $140 Ugg boots. In California, the authorities recently seized a shipment of counterfeit Angel Soft toilet paper.

The shift in the counterfeiting industry, which costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year, plays to recession-weary customers looking for downmarket deals, the authorities say. And it has been fueled in part by factories sitting idle in China. Almost 80 percent of the seized counterfeit goods in the United States last year were produced in China, where the downturn in legitimate exports during the recession left many factories looking for goods  in some cases, any goods  to produce.

“If there is demand, there will be supply,” said John Spink, associate director of the Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection Program at Michigan State University. In China, he said, “It’s all of a sudden them saying, ‘We have low capacity. What can we make?’ ”

The answer is increasingly knockoffs of lesser-known brands, which are easy to sell on the Internet, can be priced higher than obvious fakes, and avoid the aggressive programs by the big luxury brands to protect their labels, retail companies and customs enforcement officials say.