About a year ago, Wende Zomnir, the founder and executive creative director of makeup brand Urban Decay, was called into the company general manager's office. She was told she'd be getting the first look at the new packaging on the latest run of the company's popular Naked Palette. But Zomnir was underwhelmed when she saw it. It looked cheap. The packaging was off and the printing on the label was cockeyed. The velvet paper inside was scuffed up.

"He asked what I thought of it, he said this was a way to make it more cost effective. I totally freaked out." Zomnir explained. "And then he told me it was fake." She was relieved to hear it was a joke.

Zomnir and the Urban Decay team, as well as other popular makeup and beauty brands, are increasingly dealing with counterfeiters who sell fake products on eBay.

"You hear about Prada handbags being counterfeited, but I never thought about it as something that would happen to us," said Zomnir. "In a way I was proud, I felt like we'd joined the big leagues. But then I got mad."

These counterfeit beauty products, the company has learned from working with U.S. Customs as well as eBay and Amazon, are mostly manufactured in China and then shipped in bulk to the U.S. and bought through online wholesale marketplaces like Alibaba and DHGate. As wholesalers, they sell to distributors, not directly to customers, but those sites give counterfeiters a huge platform for reaching U.S. shoppers. Due to the volume of the trading and laws that differ from country to country, it's incredibly hard to regulate the transactions that occur on these sites.

On its blog, DHGate has a post describing the company's policy toward dealing with counterfeiting: "Your payment for an item will not instantly be released to the seller until you confirm that you’ve received the order and are satisfied with it." If buyers didn't want the counterfeit merchandise, this might be effective — but in many instances, the buyers actually want the fakes. Alibaba also has a page outlining its counterfeit policies, pointing out that "Many foreign companies have done little to protect their IP rights in China, leaving their products vulnerable to counterfeiting."

When wholesale customers stateside get ahold of the items — sometimes for as little as $10 a piece— they often try to resell them on eBay or Amazon. According to the Urban Decay's treasurer, John Ferrari, the products tend to be listed at about half retail price once they hit eBay or Amazon. The Naked Palette retails for $50 while the fake ones often go for $20 to $25.

The systems in place to catch counterfeiters don't work that well, Ferrari contentds: "We have a program in place with U.S. Customs that intercepts these shipments from time to time but it most likely catches only a fraction of the amount eventually shipped into the U.S."

While the government tries to stop counterfeiters, much of the onus is on the company itself. For example, eBay's VeRO (Verified Rights Owners) program allows copyrighted brands to report fakes they find for sale. But sorting through the listings to determine what might be fake and what might be real is a laborious task.