A tricky ball game, this

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: Jason Yao lives a dangerous life for a guy in the golf business. He gets death threats. He raids factories and markets. He shakes down informants and hangs out with private investigators. He has 10 aliases.

China is the focus of the worldwide war against counterfeit golf products, and Yao is on the front lines. His employer, Acushnet, located 7,000 miles away in Fairhaven, Mass, makes the world’s most popular — and most copied — golf ball, the Titleist Pro V1, along with clubs, accessories, and shoes that counterfeiters mimic for sales around the globe.

As Chinese officials crack down this summer on the sale of fake items to Olympic fans in Beijing, Yao is further south in that country, raiding factories that make ersatz Titleist clubs and golf bags. Acushnet is one of a growing number of merchants fighting the increasingly sophisticated counterfeit operations, which are diverting billions of dollars globally to the black market for everything from golf balls and brake pads to pharmaceuticals and luxury handbags. In its most recent report, the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce estimated that counterfeited goods cost more than $600 billion annually in lost sales, tax revenue, and jobs. For Massachusetts, the largest US exporter of golf balls, counter- feited Titleists could mean millions less in tax revenue.

Increasingly, Chinese fakes are being exported to US through online sales on such sites as eBay and Craigslist, where copycats see a chance to cash in on American consumers looking for deals. Technological advances make it easier to manufacture fake goods that look almost like the real products. About 81 %t of all counterfeit products seized in the US came from China in 2006, up from 65 % a year earlier, according to the latest US government statistics. And the slow reaction by Chinese officials to the burgeoning business of rip-offs has forced brands such as Acushnet, Gucci, and Tiffany to largely take on the fakers on their own.

Acushnet is spending more than $2 million a year to combat counterfeiting, a budget that didn’t exist five years ago. The $1.4 billion company is training US federal customs agents to recognise fakes—for example, to know that since Titleist balls are manufactured in America, all imports from China are counterfeits.