- Tucson Medical Center staff are noticing an increase in counterfeit car seats being brought in by new parents who unknowingly purchased them, posing a serious safety risk to infants.
Buying a car seat should be one of the more straightforward parts of preparing for a new baby. You pick one, you install it, you feel mildly accomplished, and you move on to the next item on an overwhelming list. But a troubling pattern emerging out of Tucson, Arizona suggests that for a growing number of new parents, that process is going sideways before the baby even comes home.
Staff at Tucson Medical Center are reporting a noticeable uptick in counterfeit car seats showing up at the hospital, brought in by new parents who genuinely believe they purchased a legitimate product. The seats look the part. Some even come with chest clips now, which used to be one of the easier giveaways that something was off. But looking official and being safe are two very different things, and these seats fail on the second count entirely.
TikTok Shop Is Where the Problem Starts
As you can see above, selling counterfeit car seats is not a new scam. However, the social media platform has changed.
The counterfeit seats are almost always purchased through third-party online sellers, with TikTok Shop emerging as a particularly active marketplace for this stuff. Creators run sponsored posts, collect a cut of each sale, and move on. The parents who buy these seats often have no idea they just handed over money for a product that has never passed a single crash test and does not meet U.S. federal safety standards. Not one. Zero…